


the old familiar sting

by confidentialityspice



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Major Character Injury, Oliver angsts all over the place, Spoilers for the season 2 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-03 09:07:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1739093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confidentialityspice/pseuds/confidentialityspice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A terrible attack lands his partner in the hospital. Oliver is sure he watched her die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When it happens, his body goes limp. That’s something he’s never told them.

When it happens, his body goes limp. That’s something he’s never told them. 

His mind goes blank as his muscles slacken. His eyes stay open, ever watching, waiting for the death blow to be dealt to him, but none of his enemies put him out of his misery. He’s forced to continue, to endure, to remember. 

The salty taste of the ocean on his lips. The smell of the sea in his nostrils, filling his lungs. The pool of red that formed behind his father as the gun fell from his hand. 

The familiar smell of the wet dirt on the island, the blustery wind whipping around him as he stares into her blank face. The soft sounds of Sara’s sobbing, of the gunshot still ringing through the trees. The copper taste of blood in his mouth, because he bit down too hard as he fell. The howling pain of losing his two closest allies, his only friends on an unforgiving island. 

Or the dank smell of dead grass, of the gasoline burning in the cars off in the distance. The sound of gut-wrenching, howling sobs from his sister. The feel of the rope against his wrists, bound too tight for him to break free. The expression on his mother’s face, having just made the ultimate sacrifice for her children.

It’s his way of reacting; it’s happened enough, far too often, that he suspects it’s just his way of coping with the shock. He never had the presence of mind to feel ashamed until now. 

They’d been walking together down an alley, the three of them -- Diggle, Felicity in the middle, then Oliver with his mask on but his hood down -- when they were ambushed. The soldier and the archer sprang into action, recognizing the band of assassins as some of Merlyn’s henchmen. They fell in, surrounding Felicity, drawing gun and bow and working with precision. Oliver, equipped with tranquilizer arrows, took out three men in no time; Diggle pistol-whipped two others. Felicity stood wedged between them, turning as they turned, her fists twisted in the leather on Oliver’s back.

Her gasp cued him in that Diggle was in trouble; Oliver turned to see his partner dragged down the alley by his neck, where he struggled to fight off a particularly handsy assassin by kicking his legs into the air and then crouching low, sending the man into the brick wall. 

Oliver, separated from his partner by five more assassins, herded Felicity to the opposite wall, keeping his back to her as he shot off tranquilizer-tipped arrows. Three more masked men appeared, but it was becoming rapidly clear that none of them were League-trained. They fell quickly, their shots were wild, and they didn’t fight hand-to-hand the way Merlyn and Sara had been trained. 

Still, Oliver began to panic at the sheer amount of men they were facing. He was running low on arrows, and if more of them were coming, he would have to resort to more lethal tactics. 

Felicity was practically flat against the wall behind him; she moved with his body as he turned, taking care not to impede his elbow as he drew back on his bow. His primary concern was for Diggle, but he was also desperate to find some cover for Felicity so that she wasn’t in direct danger.

“Digg!” Oliver called down the alley. He was answered by two quick gunshots; the fact that it was Diggle’s gun was both reassuring and alarming. 

Oliver scanned the opposite building, hoping for a ledge for his grappling hook, but there was no such luck. Off to his side, there was a large dumpster under a plate glass window of a restaurant, and he took a moment to turn and shove Felicity toward it. 

“Get down!”

She scurried toward the dumpster, crouching to dive behind it as Oliver was grabbed by another black-clad man. Grabbing an arrow from his quiver, Oliver stabbed the man in the shoulder, then turned to make sure Felicity was out of sight. The man crumpled almost comically, but Oliver wasn’t fast enough for the three men that followed him. He managed to notch one arrow and fell one of the men, but another hit Oliver’s forearm just right, so that the bow went clattering away from Felicity’s hiding spot. 

Forced to resort to hand-to-hand, Oliver felt somewhat relieved that no more masked men were appearing. The remaining two goons proved to be better fighters than their counterparts, but Oliver’s main goal was to get the men as far away from Felicity as possible.

However, one particularly bad blow to the side of his head sent him reeling, and when his vision cleared, he saw the bigger of the two men diving for Felicity. 

Oliver let out an unintelligible yell, barely registering the gunshot in the distance or the second blow to the back of his head as the smaller man punched him again. He staggered forward, his arms flinging out wildly, desperate to stop the man, but he was caught from behind yet again and went careening into the alley wall. 

He sat up in time to see a shock of blonde hair, then he heard a clang as Felicity swung a rusty old cast iron pan at a man nearly three times her size. Oliver only had about a millisecond to feel a surge of pride at her prowess; the man reeled backward but stayed on his feet, shaking his head and grabbing the side of the dumpster for support. She’d lost the element of surprise.

“No,” Oliver choked out, putting his hands out to search for his bow. He seized it gratefully as the smaller man lunged at him with a dagger; he notched an arrow easily, working mostly on muscle memory, his eyes on Felicity as she crouched back behind the dumpster. 

The smaller man’s body hit the ground as the big man roared. “You _bitch_!” 

It all went slow after that, like a nightmare, like all of the nightmares. He couldn’t swing his bow around, couldn’t notch another arrow, fast enough. It wasn’t humanly possible. The man was howling and lunging forward, and Felicity was crouching away, trying to disappear behind the dumpster. She wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t even whimpering; Oliver could hear and see everything in excruciating detail as the man dragged Felicity out by her ponytail.

Oliver desperately tried to move faster, but the arrow was only halfway out of the quiver, the bow was still turned toward the man he just shot, and it happened before Oliver could even notch the arrow.

With sickening precision, the man snapped his blonde-wrapped hand against the brick wall, and Felicity’s body crumpled. 

Oliver went limp and fell sideways into the alley.

* * *

His eyes stay open, ever watching, waiting for the death blow to be dealt to him, wishing with his entire being that this man would put him out of his misery. He’s forced to continue, to endure, to remember.

He can smell the rancid food from the dumpster and gunpowder. He feels the stillness and ever-present mist of the city, the cold and jagged asphalt under his cheek, the bow that betrayed him still gripped in his hand. 

He’ll wake up from this nightmare. He’ll be thrashing and sweating in his bed, fighting off demons before sickening realization -- or overwhelming, sweeping relief -- sets in. He has this dream every night, different versions but with the same memories, the same ending of laying sideways on the ground, broken and helpless.

He doesn’t wake up. 

Dimly, he registers another gunshot. He watches, dazed, as the big man jerks violently and slams into the dumpster. He falls without grace into the alley, a perfect round bullethole in the back of his head.

“Oliver!” 

He can’t respond. His stomach seizes up as Diggle’s footsteps draw near, but his limbs are heavy and his eyes are wet. He lay there absurdly, paralyzed by shock and grief as Diggle draws even with him. 

“Oliver,” Diggle snaps, his voice tense with panic as he runs for the dumpster, but Oliver can’t move, he can only watch. Diggle blocks his view of her slumped body, her blonde ponytail still propped against the brick wall. 

He watches the soldier crouch down, tries to stave off the howling pain that’s building in his chest as he realizes he failed again, as he wishes they would’ve taken him this time, just like all the others. 

There’s no way he’s going to survive this.

“Oliver, you need to go,” Diggle says, his face suddenly filling Oliver’s line of vision. “I’m calling an ambulance, but the Arrow can’t be laying here in shock when they arrive.”

“Digg --” he chokes, relief and disbelief struggling to take center stage of his emotions. “She --?”

But Diggle’s expression is grim, and Oliver senses deep disappointment and wariness in his friend. 

He reanimates enough to get to his feet, but when he tries to walk toward Felicity -- still motionless, still terrifying -- Diggle shoves him in the chest. 

“I’ll take care of her, but you need to go now.” 

Oliver’s not used to taking orders, and he’s not used to Diggle issuing them, but he’s not in control of his faculties and decides to trust that Digg knows what he’s doing. He hesitates, meeting Diggle’s eyes. “Digg…”

_Take care of her. Don’t let her die. Tell her…_

Diggle simply nods and turns away, dialing 911 on his phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from the song "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails (though I think the Johnny Cash cover fits this work better). 
> 
> Writing is scary, and writing for this fandom is downright terrifying, so thank you for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Aren’t you gonna ask?”
> 
> Clenching his fists, Oliver turns slowly on his heels and faces the detective. “Ask what?”
> 
> “How this happened?” Quentin says pointedly. “What she was doing in the Glades at one in the morning? Why it looks like she was running around with the Arrow?” 
> 
> Oliver lifts his shoulders slightly. “Does it matter?”

Oliver gets to the hospital half an hour later, dressed in jeans and his black leather jacket, trying to fight off the after effects of the shock and adrenaline. He hasn’t heard from Diggle, so he’s wired with nervous energy when he strolls into the ER waiting room and runs right into Detective Lance.

“Queen? What are you doing here?” Lance asks in his usual gruff way, his eyes squinted suspiciously.

Oliver finds he’s not emotionally equipped to take on the Oliver Queen role, so he has to dig deep for some feigned detachment as he says, “I heard a friend of mine was attacked tonight.” Not his best acting, but it’ll have to do.

“Felicity Smoak?” Quentin asks suspiciously, his eyes narrowed on Oliver as he takes in his restless stance and his jittery hands. “I didn’t know you two were friends, I thought she was your former secretary --”

“Executive assistant,” Oliver corrects automatically, the words blurted like a snap instead of a simple correction. This only makes the detective more suspicious. 

“Do you know anything about what might’ve happened to her tonight?”

“No, I just know she was admitted,” Oliver says quickly. “What did happen, Detective?”

Quentin sighs and glances down at his notepad. “EMTs got an anonymous call to an alleyway in the Glades, about four blocks from your old nightclub. They found Miss Smoak behind a dumpster, surrounded by thirteen masked men who had been shot with tranquilizer arrows. Two of them had non-fatal gunshot wounds, and the only casualty was one man who took a bullet to the head.” 

“Found her behind a dumpster,” Oliver repeats, pretending it’s new information even as he wills away the memory of her slumped body. “What is her condition now?”

“Critical,” Lance says, his voice taking on an edge of anger. “Broken ribs, broken arm, and significant head trauma. Won’t be able to see her for hours, but they don’t think she’ll regain consciousness anytime soon.”

Oliver, who had taken each piece of news like a blow to the gut, turns away without a response. He’s halfway to the nurse’s desk when Lance calls out, “Aren’t you gonna ask?”

Clenching his fists, Oliver turns slowly on his heels and faces the detective. “Ask what?”

“How this happened?” Quentin says pointedly. “What she was doing in the Glades at one in the morning? Why it looks like she was running around with the Arrow?” 

Oliver lifts his shoulders slightly. “Does it matter?”

Quentin laughs mirthlessly. “Maybe the answers don’t… but the fact that you didn’t ask the questions matters a hell of a lot.” 

He gives Oliver a last searching look before turning and leaving the hospital. 

 

* * *

 

The doctor seeks him out an hour later. Oliver is mildly surprised to hear that he's one of Felicity's emergency contacts, and that she hadn't listed any next-of-kin. He knows for sure that she at least has a mother. Right? 

Does he really know _anything_ about her?

"Mr. Queen, she's not out of the woods yet," the ER doctor, Dr. Lucas, says grimly. The front of his scrubs are covered in blood -- in _her_ blood."She suffered significant head trauma, including swelling around the brain, which we had to relieve. She's undergone significant blood loss from that and her broken ribs. She's stable now, but only just. We’ve moved her to intensive care."

Oliver breathes shallowly as the doctor's face swims in front of him. Possible brain damage. To the smartest woman he's ever met. And it's all his fault. 

"The good news is that her lungs weren't punctured, and most of her left side seems to be unharmed. We are going to keep her sedated for the next few hours, and after that, it's hard to tell how quickly... or even _if_ she will wake up," the doctor concludes, clearly striving for some compassion. 

"When can I see her?" Oliver asks softly. 

"Not tonight, I'm afraid," the doctor replies sympathetically. "If she remains stable, you'll be allowed back at the start of visiting hours in the morning."

Oliver nods once, curtly, and the doctor walks away without another word, heading back through the double-doors where they're keeping her. 

Diggle gets there only ten minutes later. 

“You left her.”

“No. I called from a blocked number, then went to the roof and watched them to make sure she was okay,” Diggle mutters heatedly, dropping into the chair beside Oliver. “I couldn’t be found with her, not surrounded by your handiwork.” 

Still, Oliver tastes bile when he thinks of Felicity laying alone in that alley. He shakes his head and clenches his fists again, noting the raw skin of his knuckles for the first time. 

“Did they say when we can see her?”

“Not until the morning,” Oliver answers with a clenched jaw. 

Diggle doesn’t ask why he’s staying. 

 

* * *

 

Even though they both tried at least once every half hour to go back and see her, the nurses don’t permit Diggle and Oliver behind the double-doors until 7AM. Both men are haggard and tired as they follow the slender, husky-voiced nurse to the last room on the ward. 

“You’re not allowed in yet,” she says as they draw even with the door. Both Diggle and Oliver lean against the large window looking into her room. 

Felicity looks tiny, frail, and broken. Her right arm is bound in a cast that goes from her hand all the way past her elbow, and the sheet is drawn up to her chest, covering the bandaging on her torso. She has a breathing tube in her mouth, which causes her chest to rise and fall rhythmically. She has IVs in her arm for pain medication and a blood transfusion. But it’s her head injury that makes both men shift somberly. The bandage wraps all the way around her head, but the injury appears large, extending from her cheek, past her temple, and up the entire right side of her head. They had to shave her hair to do the surgery. The sight nearly breaks Oliver.

“I’ll let you two have ten minutes,” the nurse says, and she’s gone before either man can acknowledge her. 

Oliver presses his forehead to the cool glass, fighting off more nausea as he looks at his beautiful, broken partner. “I thought she was dead. I thought I watched her die.”

Diggle clears his throat beside him. “It didn’t look good,” he agrees, his voice gruff. “For either of you.”

He won’t ask. Oliver realizes it slowly, as the silence stretches into minutes. They both are staring into the room where their partner lay unconscious, and he should be blaming Oliver for not protecting her, for failing her, for slumping over in the alley instead of running to her side, but Diggle doesn’t blame him at all. 

Oliver doesn’t deserve either of them.

The nurse returns all too quickly, chiding them to go home and wait for updates, but Oliver refuses to leave. 

“Mr. Queen, there’s nothing you can do for your girlfriend while she’s like this,” the nurse says, her green eyes alight with sympathy. “The best thing for you to do now is take care of yourself. Go home.”

But he can’t. His guilt and restlessness won’t allow him to sleep, and it’s not like he has a home to return to, anyhow. Not with his sister gone and the mansion auctioned off. 

The full weight of what Oliver almost lost makes his chest feel tight. 

Diggle leaves him in the waiting room, because he has a pregnant girlfriend at home. Oliver sets up camp right by the double-doors, watching as a steady stream of patients are admitted throughout the day for various gang-related injuries. Some of them recognize him, but he avoids eye contact, staying on his phone or staring at the TV blankly. No one approaches him.

Detective Lance returns around midday, looking tired and rumpled, and he doesn’t seem surprised to see Oliver sitting there. 

“Queen,” he says tersely, striding over to where Oliver is sitting. He sits in the chair beside him and pulls out his notepad. “Got more information on your girl.” 

For the second time that day, Oliver chooses not to argue the point that Felicity’s not his girlfriend. 

“There were reports of gunfire at 1:05 AM, most people we canvassed seemed to agree that it was at least two or three shots. Most of the men are in custody, except the one who took a bullet to the head. He appears to be the one that put Miss Smoak in the hospital, judging by the blonde hairs we found in the palm of his hand.”

Sickened, Oliver leans forward, placing his head in his hands. 

“Guy’s name was Anatoli Andreyev, Russian-born but not affiliated with the Bratva. We don’t know why he and his friends are in Starling, or why he was killed while the Arrow chose to just knock out the rest of them…” Lance trails off. “Crime scene unit seems to think he was killed because of what he did to Miss Smoak.”

Oliver swallows hard before lifting his head to face Quentin. “So the man that did this to her is dead, you think.” 

“The rest of them are in custody, but are refusing to talk,” Quentin says. “Usually I get information from the Arrow that helps me put away the bad guys, but he didn’t stick around this time. He left Miss Smoak for dead in the alley, and after 48 hours, these guys are gonna walk.” 

Oliver feels a volley of guilt in his gut at the sharp bitterness in Quentin’s tone. He turns his head away, unable to keep the emotions off his face, too raw and tired to keep up the charade. 

“Oliver,” Quentin says, his accent twisting around his name in his odd way. “I don’t know what this girl means to you, or if you know about her dealings with the vigilante, but something’s not right. Usually, when lives are in danger -- when _her life_ is in danger -- he would take the kill shot. But the perp had a bullet wound, he wasn’t stuck with an arrow. And the rest of the men, they’re not going to answer for their crimes now.”

Oliver clenches his jaw and meets Quentin’s eyes. “Why are you telling me this, Detective?”

Quentin sits back, his mouth twisting in disappointment. “Because I thought you’d be motivated to find some answers. For her.” 

 

* * *

 

Long after Quentin is gone, Oliver still doesn’t have answers.

Diggle shows up after sunset and hands Oliver his duffel bag with a change of clothes, his laptop, and his phone charger. Oliver takes it, feeling a strange mixture of gratitude and self-loathing. 

Digg sits beside him and talks about Lyla: how she was doing, how worried she was, and how her anxiety is off the charts with less than a month until the due date. Oliver wonders vaguely if he will still be sitting here when Lyla is giving birth, and the thought turns his stomach over. 

Eventually, Digg asks if Oliver’s been back to see her again, even though he knows the answer. 

He doesn’t ask how long Oliver plans to stay. 

He doesn’t ask if Oliver has thought this through.

He doesn’t ask about Oliver’s reaction to seeing Felicity nearly killed. 

Oliver feels like he’s going to jump out of his skin, so he grabs his bag and practically runs to the men’s room. Once inside, he splashes cold water on his face and takes in his appearance: gaunt, tired, red-rimmed eyes, and disheveled hair. 

_“You know you need a haircut.”_

_“The hood covers it pretty well.”_

_“Yeah, but that’s just at night. You have to get a job again sometime, you’re kind of broke.”_

_“Felicity, I just took out one of the biggest crime lords in the city. Can I at least celebrate that victory before you start berating me for my appearance?”_

_“I’m just saying, no one’s going to hire a man who looks as homeless as he actually is.”_

His gut twists at the memory of the conversation they’d had only four nights ago, when he’d removed his hood and mask in the foundry after a successful mission. He’d chuckled softly at her as he peeled off his gloves, and she’d shook her head with an amused smile as she tousled his hair lightly. She was always so fascinated with how quickly his hair grew. 

Now, in the unforgiving fluorescent light of the hospital bathroom, Oliver changes his clothes and runs his hand over his face, trying to iron away some of the exhaustion.

When he returns to the waiting room, Diggle is waiting for him expectantly. 

“Lyla was looking into why Merlyn would send assassins after us --”

“They weren’t assassins,” Oliver interrupts tiredly. “Not League-affiliated, anyway. They didn’t fight like it.”

“Either way, they were sent to kill us,” Diggle says insistently. “And that’s bad enough, considering you and Malcolm are kind of family now.”

Oliver blanches at the distasteful recollection. He wonders, fleetingly, where Thea is, and if she’s safe from her father’s clutches. He hasn’t heard from her since she left the city in May. 

“Lyla has been monitoring chatter since this afternoon; no one seems to know what happened in that alley, or why.” 

Oliver can’t keep the irritation from his voice. “So?”

“So?” Digg repeats incredulously. “So one of your partners is unconscious thanks to him, don’t you at least owe it to her to figure out why?”

“What will that accomplish, Digg?” Oliver growls. “More bloodshed, one of us in the hospital, my secret exposed?”

“We can at least call in Sara, or find Roy, or do something --”

“There’s nothing _to do_ until she wakes up,” Oliver says firmly. “Until she’s awake, and talking, and recovering, I’m only Oliver Queen.” 

Digg’s lip curls as he glares at Oliver in frustration. He lets out a long, deep sigh and crosses his arms, dipping his head down until he’s looking Oliver in the eye. “At some point, you gotta stop blaming yourself, man. We stopped being your responsibility a long time ago. We choose to stay.” 

Oliver turns away without answering, and Diggle, to his credit, drops the subject. 

 

* * *

 

Around 3:30 in the morning, Felicity slips into a coma. 

The unlucky nurse who breaks the news to Oliver is a short, matronly woman with a thick Italian accent and kind eyes. She flinches away and lets loose a string of curse words when Oliver throws a plastic chair across the empty waiting room, unable to control his emotions as a feral roar rips from his throat. 

He’s banned from the hospital for 24 hours, and he goes to wait it out at the foundry, comforted only by the sound of the steady rainfall outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not a medical professional; in fact, almost all of the medical jargon in this chapter comes from what I remember from _House_ , so I guess Hugh Laurie deserves a shout-out here. Thanks, Hugh!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If we had any _Mirakuru_ left, I wouldn’t even hesitate --” Oliver starts, and Diggle nods sharply. 
> 
> “Me either, man.”

_“What the hell is this?” he asked, holding up the heavy crystal glass containing an amber liquid. It also had what appeared to be a maraschino cherry, an orange peel, and sugar._

_She gave him an exasperated look. “I thought you were rich. I thought you were drinking by the age of ten. I thought you were arrested for public intoxication when you were twenty.”_

_He couldn’t help the smile that unfurled on his face as she talked. “Okay. I used to drink a lot of alcohol. What’s your point?”_

_“That’s an old fashioned,” she said with maddening superiority, coming to sit beside him on her couch. “The drink of classy rich white guys.”_

_“Oh,” he said, looking at his drink with renewed interest. “My dad wasn’t really a mixed drinks guy. He just did scotch, neat.”_

_“And you just did whatever got you drunk the fastest,” she said in a would-be casual tone, but her words were pointed._

_He took a tentative sip of the drink. “Wow. That’s delicious.”_

_“One of the few things my mother taught me that has value,” she said dryly, propping her feet up on her coffee table as she cradled her glass of red wine. He mimicked her posture, holding his drink in his folded hands on his lap as he looked over at her._

_“You never talk about her.”_

_“Not much to talk about,” she said mildly, but she glanced over at him when he didn’t respond. He stared at her questioningly, until she sighed and caved._

_“When I was fifteen years old, I found out that my mother only got pregnant with me to try to trap my dad into marriage.” She shook her head. “If that doesn’t say enough about the kind of person she is, I don’t know what does.”_

_He watched the shame and anger play across her features as she stared down at her wine glass, but he didn’t say anything._

_“When he left, she sort of stopped trying to be my mom. I raised myself. Got good grades. Got a job. Got scholarships. Went to MIT as soon as I got accepted. And the whole time, I had her voice in the back of my head, telling me that the world will disappoint me, that everyone will leave, that I was better off setting my sights lower.” She licked her lips and smiled bitterly. “She really believes I’m not destined for great things.”_

_“You’ve already done great things,” Oliver couldn’t help saying. “That’s a lot to overcome, Felicity. I couldn’t have done that. I didn’t do that.”_

_She smiled softly, still not looking at him. “You know, her voice has faded over the years. Distance and time, it’s bound to happen. But I barely hear her anymore since I met you.”_

_He grinned and held up his glass. “Both of our mothers were wrong about you,” he said, clinking his glass with hers. “You’re destined for amazing things, Felicity.”_

* * *

He only achieved about two hours of sleep before the memory of that night -- of he and Felicity sharing drinks and talking softly about their mothers -- ended with her turning her head and revealing a horrifying head wound. Oliver woke up, shaken, and headed straight for the salmon ladder. 

_“I kept that. I liked watching you do that.”_

He moves up and down the ladder, sweating and gasping for air, until he can’t hold on anymore. 

When he returns to the hospital, the staff treats him warily, but the green-eyed nurse from the first night (Emma, her nametag says) tells him he’s allowed to sit in Felicity’s room, as long as he doesn’t have any more tantrums. 

He blushes, feeling real shame for the first time over his reaction. Felicity would’ve hated that. 

The intensive care ward is dark and hushed as he follows Emma back to Felicity’s room. He’s still not prepared to see her so battered and bruised. Emma hangs around for a few minutes, ostensibly to check Felicity’s stats and update her chart, but Oliver suspects she’s waiting to make sure he doesn’t start throwing things again. He stands at the foot of Felicity’s bed, filled with anger, sadness, and so much guilt, until Emma gently pushes him toward the bedside chair on Felicity’s left (and mostly undamaged) side. 

“I’ll be back in half an hour to check on her,” Emma says softly, then slips out of the room and slides the door shut. 

Left alone with Felicity, Oliver suddenly doesn’t know what to do.

He settles for just looking at her for now. This side of her face, the left side, is unharmed, nary a bruise or a scratch, beautiful as ever. Her left arm has slight abrasions around the elbow, and her left pinkie finger is in a splint; he wonders how it was broken. 

Her hair is tangled, curly, and bunched on her shoulder, pulled away from the wound on the side of her head. Oliver reaches for it without thinking, using his fingers to work the tangles and knots out of her hair methodically. It takes him a while to realize he’s crying. 

“You’re gonna hate me for this,” he says in a choked voice, his fingers stroking through her hair. “You take such good care of it. You always thought I didn’t pay attention, but I did. You love your hair.” 

He squeezes his eyes shut, because her hair is the last thing that should break him -- it’s so superficial, it’ll grow back, and God, doesn’t she have bigger things to worry about? -- but here he is, finally facing what he did, and he can’t stop the flood of emotions now. 

He grasps her hand with both of his, taking care not to jostle her broken finger, and he puts his forehead on it, letting his body shake with sobs. Too much loss, too much danger, and worst of all, he knows that as soon as she wakes up, she’ll forgive him, she’ll take away his blame, and she’ll want to go back.

He wants to keep her close, but he can’t have her in danger anymore. If this experience has taught him anything, it’s that this situation between them isn’t working. 

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, wondering if she can hear him. “Felicity, I’m so sorry you got hurt. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry I lied to you.”

He stops talking, suddenly scared of confessing something to her that he hasn’t even admitted to himself. 

How many times did she sit over his unconscious form like this? Did she feel this powerless? This helpless? This guilty? He remembers every time he woke up on that metal table in the foundry, how her face would break into a relieved smile. Was she in agony as he lay there? Did she feel anything like he’s feeling right now? 

He rests his head on the bed beside her hand, still holding it as he keeps his eyes on her face. He slips in and out of consciousness for the next three hours, only sitting up when Emma comes in to check Felicity’s vitals. _Everything is the same. She’s still breathing. She’s still in a coma. She’s still there._

She’s not there.

At seven AM, Diggle wakes up Oliver with a gentle shake of his shoulder. “The nurse says you’ve been in here since three.”

“Yeah,” Oliver says groggily, sitting up and stretching. “No change.” 

“This is hard to believe, but that’s a good thing,” Diggle says bracingly. “Her body is working overtime to heal her.”

“If we had any _Mirakuru_ left, I wouldn’t even hesitate --” Oliver starts, and Diggle nods sharply. 

“Me either, man.” He holds up a small duffel that Oliver recognizes as Felicity’s bug-out bag. She’s kept it packed ever since the quake, in case she needs to bolt with them in the night. 

“I stopped by her apartment,” Digg explains when Oliver only stares at him questioningly. “Grabbed this, along with her soap, her shampoo -- you know she buys this expensive argan oil stuff from that boutique downtown? Lyla 'bout went crazy when I showed her, she says this stuff costs $35 a bottle.” 

He holds up the ridiculous bottle -- it’s hot pink with little hibiscus flowers and a loopy font, and it shouldn’t make Oliver tear up, it really shouldn’t, but it does, and Diggle nearly drops the bottle in alarm. 

“Hey, it’s just soap,” Diggle says, grinning uncomfortably, but then he glances at Felicity and puts two and two together. “And her hair will grow back. You know how she is, she’ll make some kind of joke about it and move on.”

Oliver can’t help but push the point. “They shaved half of her head.”

“You saw how happy she was to get shot,” Diggle reasons with an even bigger smile. “Girl’s crazy. She’ll pull through and be over the moon about her new battle scars.” 

Oliver wants to believe him; he probably _should_ believe him, because Diggle is very rarely wrong. Guilt is a powerful thing, though, and Oliver is having trouble imagining a version of Felicity that emerges from this coma with her sense of humor and happy-go-lucky outlook intact. 

After carefully setting the bag on the table next to Felicity’s bed, Digg drops down in one of the plastic chairs by the window, steepling his fingers and staring at Oliver. 

“What?”

“Lyla got some information today.” 

Oliver doesn’t say anything.

“Merlyn is back in Starling City.”

Oliver stiffens. “Where?”

“You’re not gonna like it.”

* * *

The drive to the former Queen Mansion is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. 

It was Oliver’s home since he was born; aside from his five years of exile, Oliver didn’t know of life without the mansion as his home. For the last four months, he’s been sleeping at the foundry, crashing on Diggle’s couch, or sleeping in Felicity’s guest room, because he hasn’t been able to face the idea of finding himself a new home. It was easier to just be a transient. 

It’s always easier not to have roots. 

The mansion looks the same as ever, except for the two armed guards in the porte-cochère. They do nothing to stop Oliver and Diggle from walking past them and ringing the doorbell, so Merlyn is definitely expecting them. 

They’re shown into the parlor, which is dark and forbidding now, instead of light-filled and homey. Malcolm Merlyn is sitting at a chess board, replete in black garb, and he greets Oliver with a broad smile that never reaches his eyes. 

“Mr. Queen! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You sent an army of men to kill me,” Oliver says through gritted teeth, too exhausted and angry to deal with social niceties. 

“To kill you?” Malcolm laughs, and the sound is bone-chilling. “No, no, dear Oliver. If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve sent real assassins. Those men were just… a welcoming committee.”

Oliver blinks as Diggle tenses next to him. “Your welcoming committee put one of my colleagues in a coma.” 

“And that man paid dearly for it,” Malcolm says with false gravity. 

“I want to know _why_.” 

“Because I know who you are, Oliver,” Malcolm says, lowering his chin to fix his cold eyes on Oliver. These are the moments -- right now, and when Oliver was chained to a ceiling, and when they faced off on that rooftop -- that Malcolm bears very little resemblance to either of his children. Whether his coldness and contempt for the world could’ve been bred into Tommy or Thea, Oliver can’t be sure, but even in their darkest moments, neither his best friend nor his sister ever came close to the insanity exhibited by their father.

Malcolm stands up and smirks at the two men before him, his back stiff as he folds his hands behind his back. “I know what you do at night. I know what you’ve done to this city. I know that you spent a year believing you had beaten me.” He comes to stand right in front of Oliver, bending so that their noses are only an inch apart. “I wanted you to know that you were wrong.”

“She was innocent,” Oliver snarls, unable to stop himself. “She didn’t deserve what you did to her.” 

“Didn’t she?” Malcolm smiles coldly. “I didn’t tell them to kill anyone, Oliver. I told them to attack you, to intimidate you, to send you running home scared. Whatever happened to your pretty blonde friend in that alley, it’s not my fault.” 

Oliver resists the urge to reach out and throttle Merlyn. Beside him, he knows Digg is prepared for that eventuality. But there are two armed guards just outside the room, plus two more in the porte-cochère, which means there are countless more hidden on the property. 

He owes it to Felicity to make it out of here alive. 

“No more,” Oliver says tightly, his jaw clenched as he stares into Merlyn’s soulless eyes. “No more fighting, no more intimidating. You give us our space, we’ll give you yours.”

Malcolm straightens up, holding his hands out in an absurdly magnanimous gesture. “That’s all I wanted to hear, Oliver,” he says, smiling even as his eyes narrow. “I’m glad you got my message loud and clear.”

“We’re not really gonna let him set up shop in this city, are we?” Diggle asks in an undertone as they head toward the car, their shoulders hunched against the chill of early fall. 

“It won’t last forever,” Oliver vows quietly. “But for now, yes, we let him go about his business. But we keep an eye on him.”

“How…?” Diggle starts, then trails off uncomfortably. They climb into the car and he never finishes the question. 

_How will we do that without our IT girl?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to my husband and his brother, who spent an entire summer drinking old fashioneds like it was their job.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A crowded room or an empty corridor, it’s all the same -- he registers moods, movements, and sudden shifts, and he takes them on himself. 
> 
> He’s never going to leave that island.

There were hours upon days upon weeks where Felicity would teach Oliver about technology. It was mind-boggling for her that he’d been shipwrecked before smart phones, before eReaders, before most of modern technology actually happened. Out of an obligation to their company, she taught him how to use tablets, network sharing, and wifi; out of concern for the well being of the foundry in her absence, she taught him how to use the surveillance programs on her bank of computers, how to program the bugs and chips that she kept in a locked cabinet, and how to play music through the Bluetooth speaker from his phone while he was working out.

_“That way, I won’t show up from an extended vacation to find my hard drives melted, or half of my bugging devices smashed.” She was smiling as she said it, shoving him lightly with her shoulder as they sat side-by-side at her bank of computers, but he knew that was a real concern for her._

_“I would just buy you more,” he said, off-handed, examining the far left monitor on her desk intently._

_She scoffed. “Spoken like a man who has never had to worry about money.”_

_“Or like someone who wants to make sure you have the best equipment that money can buy,” he said._

_He was surprised to look up, after she’d fallen uncharacteristically silent, to find her eyes shining. She gave him a watery smile and said, “That was… really sweet, Oliver.”_

He doesn’t sit in her chair when he gets to the foundry that night. He uses his thumb and forefinger to move it gingerly to the side as he drags his chair over to her bank of computers. He knows he’s being absurd, knows she wouldn’t care if he used her chair, but it would feel disrespectful.

The computers are still running like they haven’t even noticed her absence. Oliver’s often thought of the computers as her children, and of Felicity as the overprotective mother hen that wouldn’t even let Sara near the screens without hovering behind her, watching her every move. Seeing the computers still functioning as normal, still running diagnostics and general face recognition software, makes Oliver feel a little sick.

The things Felicity cares about the most are the things that are least capable of expressing their love and gratitude back to her.

She’d programmed her surveillance software to be fairly intuitive, “So even a toddler could figure out how to spy on Isabel,” she’d said of the program back in January. Cameras had been placed all over the Queen Consolidated building, but Oliver hadn’t let her stop there. It only took her two weeks to hack into the city’s closed-circuit surveillance system, override their security, and set up remote monitoring and facial recognition through there. The city was none the wiser.

There are no cameras in that alley, though.

Still, thanks to Lance methodically booking every last man that had attacked them in the alley, Oliver is able to access their mug shots, run scans, and set up the software to monitor the city for any activity. He thinks of how proud she would be as he programs the computers to send any alerts to his phone. She never accused Oliver of being stupid -- she only ever accused him of not listening to her.

Night has fallen; it’s been a long day, and Oliver suspects he won’t be allowed to stay in Felicity’s room overnight, so he peels off his shirt and kicks off his shoes, climbing into the cot he sleeps on in the back of the foundry. He might as well try to get some sleep. And maybe some food in the morning.

 

* * *

 

_"You shot me." Her voice was loud, surprised, but not pitched with pain._

_He touched the back of his neck, confused and guilty as he stared at her. Something was wrong. "I didn't."_

_"You did." Still loud, echoing through the room, but devoid of inflection. She showed him her hands, red with blood._

_"No," he said emphatically, sitting up. "That's my blood." He glanced down at his naked torso, to indicate his multiple bullet wounds, but there were none. No scars, no holes, no blood. He looked back up at her, where she was standing with her hands out, her expression bemused. He could see that the blood went up to her elbows, dripping onto the gleaming concrete floor. This is a memory._

_Right?_

_"That's my blood," he repeated, staring into her eyes. She shook her head and snapped her wrists sharply; blood splattered everywhere._

_"You shot me, Oliver," she said dispassionately, even louder now that he was paying attention._

_"Where?" he asked urgently, confused. "I don't remember..."_

_She held out an arrow in both hands, extending it to him, dripping red. He shrank away, because he could see it in her eyes now: distrust, anger, blame. Her eyes sparked blue and black as she held out the arrow accusingly._

_"I didn't..." he said weakly, eyes roaming her body for a wound, for the source of the blood._

_She turned her head slowly, and he retched at the sight of the wound in the side of her head. Exposed bone, blood, brain --_

_"You shot me." The arrow flies toward him, loosened from a bow._

_"No!"_

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes up suddenly and throws himself over the side of the cot, dry heaving onto the floor. There's nothing in his stomach to expel, but it doesn't dull the pain.

Her image, blood-stained and accusatory, is seared into his mind. He blinks away tears of pain and distress as he sits upright again.

A nightmare.

The memories are always clearer. The backgrounds are crisp, detailed, unforgiving, but the nightmares are out of focus and vague.

She was clear, though. She was great and terrible.

He shoves himself out of bed, surprised at the bit of sunlight peeking in through the high windows. He’d slept most of the night, but his body feels wrung out and tired. He wonders how much he tossed and turned, how much sleep he actually got.

He grabs a bagel and coffee from a coffee shop on the way to the hospital and eats ravenously. He can’t remember the last time he ate. Days? A week?

He gets to the hospital at 9, but he nearly goes ballistic when Emma tells him that Felicity has been moved out of intensive care.

“Why didn’t anyone call me? I’m her emergency contact!” he says, his voice traveling clearly through the quiet waiting room.

“It only just happened, Mr. Queen. She’s been set up in a private suite on the tenth floor.”

“Does that mean she woke up?” he asks, hating himself for how childishly hopeful he sounds.

Emma’s expression becomes shuttered. “No. It just means she’s stable enough that she doesn’t need intensive monitoring.” She looks like she wants to say more -- perhaps utter some words of caution to him about Felicity’s chances -- but Oliver doesn’t give her the opportunity to break his heart. He asks for her room number and stalks toward the corridor to the main part of the hospital without so much as a thank-you.

He suspects she’s used to it.

This part of the hospital is not as grim as the ER and intensive care section, but it’s still a hospital, and there’s an edge to everyone’s movements. Oliver can sense it, the same way he senses the rest of the world. A crowded room or an empty corridor, it’s all the same -- he registers moods, movements, and sudden shifts, and he takes them on himself.

He’s never going to leave that island.

The tenth floor is the recovery ward. It’s quiet, subdued, but not somber. Oliver steps out of the elevator and meets the eyes of the auburn-haired nurse behind the glass at the nurse’s station. She recognizes him right away.

“Mr. Queen, we were told to expect you,” she says, coming around the partition and extending her hand. “I’m Jeanine. I’m one of Miss Smoak’s nurses.”

Oliver shakes her hand silently, taking in her stiff smile and her squared shoulders. Felicity might be out of intensive care, but that doesn’t mean it’s all good news. Clearing his throat, he asks, “Can I see her?”

“Yes, of course,” she says, gesturing for him to follow her. “Up here, we have different visiting hours from the rest of the hospital. Six AM to eleven PM every day, with the exception of spouses or guardians, who are allowed to stay overnight if they so wish. We encourage you to read to her, talk to her, play her favorite music or movies -- anything to keep her brain active.”

They walk into a large, square room with four L-shaped desks arranged in a square in the center. Along the three walls are the patient rooms, all windows and sliding glass doors, looking out into the city. Jeanine leads him to the far left corner, where Felicity’s scored herself a corner suite and some modicum of privacy compared to the rest of the floor. They enter the room soundlessly, greeted only by the soft whir of the machines and the compressed air that pumps into Felicity’s lungs.

“She gets checked twice a day by the doctors on call,” Jeanine says softly, pointing at the dry erase board on the wall, which lists the on-call doctor, the head nurse, and the assisting nurse. “If you have to leave the hospital and you need to relay a message to the staff, just leave a note on the board.”

“Okay,” Oliver says thickly, unprepared for all of… _this_. He doesn’t know why he finds it all so disarming, except that it seems… permanent. He glances out into the large square room again, where the nurses are moving around without urgency, where patients are laying in bed asleep or barely awake, staring blankly at the walls or windows.

They’re all coma patients.

Oliver looks back down at Felicity, no different than the others. Her eyes are closed, the bruise on her face has spread all the way to her nose and forehead, and she’s not moving.

“I know this is difficult, Mr. Queen,” Jeanine says soothingly. “But the best thing you can do for her is be here.”

He must’ve looked like he wanted to run. It probably happens fairly often; a parent sees their child unconscious and unresponsive, or a woman sees her husband looking shattered and small in a bed, and the struggle of fight-or-flight ends up tipped in the latter’s direction. But Oliver never runs. He collapses. He always collapses.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says firmly. “Thank you, Jeanine.”

She gives him a smile he’s seen countless times from women over the years. He’s charmed her, completely on accident, but still.

Once she’s gone, he takes in his surroundings with a critical eye, the eye of a man who needs to plot quick escapes and spot imminent threats. There’s an easy chair beside her bed, and three plastic chairs lined up on the wall opposite her bed, under the flatscreen TV. Along the windows (which face west, because he can barely see the ocean beyond the skyline) is a folding bed, made up with a fitted sheet, blanket, and pillow. He turns away from it, afraid of the long-term connotations, of his homelessness, of how much Felicity hated that he didn’t just buy an apartment and start over again.

He pulls the easy chair around to her left side, putting his back to the window as he settles on Felicity’s uninjured side. The room isn’t bad, as far as hospital rooms go. It’s painted a pale blue, reflecting the morning sunlight brightly, and there are three different hotel lobby-type paintings on the walls, depicting peaceful scenes in meadows and on shorelines. It’s definitely better than her digs on the intensive care ward.

The silence is deafening. The machines beep rhythmically, but not in rhythm with the ventilator. She doesn’t move, aside from the rise and fall of her chest. She doesn’t stir, doesn’t dream, doesn’t twitch.

They don’t bring her lunch, even though Oliver sees the cart in the hallway at 12:30. He supposes she’s passed over since she been intubated, but he wonders if it’s normal for coma patients to be served three square meals a day.

Just after 2:00, a Dr. Wagner comes in to check Felicity’s vitals.

“How long will she need the breathing tube?” Oliver asks after a long silence, during which he watches the gray-haired doctor check Felicity’s eyes, pulse, and heartbeat.

“Until she wakes up, I’m afraid,” the doctor says softly, his eyes still on her face. “If she stays in the coma for too long, we’ll have to do a tracheotomy.”

“Is there any way to tell…?” Oliver asks, but the doctor is already shaking his head.

“Comas vary from patient to patient, based on the cause, their age, their resiliency. She’s just as likely to wake up in ten minutes as she is to wake up in ten years.”

“You don’t know Felicity.”

The response surprises both of them. Oliver doesn’t know what made him say it, or what he even meant by it, but Dr. Wagner still raises his surprised eyes to Oliver’s face, assessing him for the first time.

“You’re Oliver Queen.”

Oliver tenses, watching the doctor warily, not offering confirmation.

“Your sister was abducted earlier this year. Your mother was murdered. You -- you were stranded on an island.” His eyes slide from Oliver’s face to Felicity’s, then back again, and Oliver reads the expression as plainly as if it were written in words across his forehead. People often make that face at him when he’s spotted with Felicity, as if they’re thinking _one of these things is not like the other._

Even in a coma, Felicity manages to make people underestimate her.

“Yes, that is all true,” Oliver says woodenly. “And now my friend is in a coma. And you are her doctor.”

“Yes,” Dr. Wagner says, and Oliver is pleased to see some color rising in his cheeks as he looks away. “And I’ll do the best I can to make sure she comes out of this, Mr. Queen.”

They don't speak for the rest of the exam, but Dr. Wagner’s movements are colored with the embarrassment of having offended Oliver. When he takes his leave, he looks like he wants to apologize, but Oliver simply thanks him and goes back to his bedside vigil, so Dr. Wagner shuts the door without saying a word.

 

* * *

 

Diggle visits at 5, toting two canvas bags and a cautiously hopeful expression.

“Not bad,” he says, glancing around the room as he slides the door shut behind him. “It’s almost nicer than her apartment.”

“Yeah, we gotta get her a better place to live,” Oliver agrees as Diggle pulls a plastic chair over to the opposite side of Felicity’s bed. “Did you bring what I asked?”

“Yeah, super secret spy cameras, as you requested,” Digg says dryly, handing over one of the canvas bags. “I have to reiterate that this stuff might interfere with her machines.”

“They just say that because they like control,” Oliver says flippantly. “Felicity would tell you the same thing -- and then she’d set up these same cameras in our hospital rooms if one of us was in here.”

Diggle’s smile fades at Oliver’s words. “Yeah. You’re right.”

Oliver clears his throat. “I’ll get these set up before I leave tonight.”

“You’re not staying?”

“Visiting hours end at 11,” Oliver recites from his tour earlier in the day, but he follows Diggle’s gaze to the cot behind him. “That’s for spouses. Parents.”

“You don’t think the staff would make an exception for you?” Digg asks as he hands over the second canvas bag, containing a rotisserie chicken and a spinach salad. “You’re losing your charm.”

“I prefer to think of it as ‘picking my battles,’” Oliver says shortly. “Anyway, it’s not like I packed a bag. I thought she was still in ICU when I got here.”

“I’ll bring you clothes in the morning,” Digg says mildly. “Lyla’s been doing your laundry anyway, you left your rucksack in the living room and she got tired of the… stench.”

Oliver rolls his eyes. “My clothes don’t stink. Just admit Lyla’s nesting. Less than three weeks left.”

“Yeah,” Diggle says, his gaze turning back to the woman lying between them. “Three weeks.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of my long-term hospital knowledge is based in the oncology section, where patients’ vitals are checked at least once an hour by two nurses, and their charts are updated with detailed notes. I have no idea if coma patients are monitored the same way, but the basic concept makes sense to me, especially since Felicity is still in pretty critical condition. Any mistakes or errors are from a complete lack of actual medical expertise on my part. _House_ didn't prepare me for this.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His left arm is still outstretched, curled over a warm hand, and for a second, he thinks it’s 2007 again, because he knows that voice, knows that smell, knows the familiarity that overwhelms him. 
> 
> For one shining, hopeful instant, Oliver actually believes the last seven years were an extended nightmare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vague references to Laurel *possibly* being the Canary, or training to be the Canary, or something along those lines. Also, Laurel is in this chapter.

By 11:15, Oliver figures he’s safe from getting kicked off the recovery ward. Maybe they’re not particularly strict about marriage statuses, or maybe the visiting hours are more guidelines than rules up here. Whatever the case, Oliver sits up until 3AM, reading books about comas on his tablet and occasionally voicing passages out loud to Felicity, just to make sure she knows he’s still there.

When his eyes are drooping and his head feels heavy, Oliver drags the cot over to Felicity’s bedside and curls up, facing her. She’s silhouetted in the dark room, her pale skin reflecting the lights of the city and the machines to her right, and she’s still unmoved from how he found her hours ago.

He curls his left hand over hers and falls asleep quickly.

 

* * *

_“No!”_

_“Felicity…”_

_“No! Not unless you tell me why!”_

_“Because I need you to be safe.”_

_“Well I don’t want to be safe,” she argued, and he bowed his head so that he wouldn’t have to see the earnest expression on her face. “I want to be with you, and the others. Unsafe.”_

_He knew that. He knew she had a death wish, whether it was for herself or for him, and it scared him. “I can’t let that happen,” he lied, because he had worse plans for her._

_“Oliver.” She put her hand on his forearm, forcing him to be still as she stared up into his eyes. “You’re not making any sense.”_

_It was his last chance to bail. His last opportunity to grab her, keep her at his side, and ensure she stayed out of harm’s way._

_But he chose to put her in the belly of the beast, because that’s where she wanted to be._

_“Slade took Laurel because he wants to kill the woman I love.”_

_“I know, so?”_

_Heart pounding, palms sweating, Oliver said, “So, he took the wrong woman.”_

_Her mouth fell open in surprise as her eyes widened. He couldn’t even decipher the emotions that crossed her features, but they were none of the ones he’d dared to hope for -- no joy, no hope, no relief. She just searched his face, like she knew._

_It hurt that she knew._

_But he had a show to do, so, “I love you.” And he meant it, in that moment, with all of his heart, but her expression was still arrested as her eyes roamed his face, and then she blinked as he slid the syringe into her hand._

_“Do you understand?”_

_She squinted slightly. He could see her brain whirring, her mind racing as his hands wrapped around hers. “Yes.” Softly. Sadly. But not reproachfully._

_He inhaled deeply, trying to convey his regret, his trust, and his protection all at once, but she was processing so much that it probably just looked heartless when he turned away._

_He left his heart in the manor, shattered into a million pieces even as he gave her the cure, and it was the hardest thing he ever had to do._

 

* * *

“Ollie?”

He starts, feeling pain shoot up his shoulder and neck as he realizes he’s slept all night on his right side. His left arm is still outstretched, curled over a warm hand, and for a second, he thinks it’s 2007 again, because he knows that voice, knows that smell, knows the familiarity that overwhelms him.

For one shining, hopeful instant, Oliver actually believes the last seven years were an extended nightmare.

But he opens his eyes and sees sunlight, sees Felicity unconscious beside him, sees Laurel’s confused and hesitant face just past the bed as she hovers in the doorway and shifts her weight uncomfortably.

Oliver feels like he’s suffocating as he relives all the loss he thought he’d escaped, from his father on that life raft, all the way until the night Felicity was smashed against a wall. He sits up and fights to get air into his lungs, dropping Felicity’s hand and rubbing his face vigorously. “Laurel.”

“Hey, I… didn’t mean to…” She gestures awkwardly at Oliver and Felicity, not quite indicating anything salacious, but not denying it, either.

Oliver doesn’t offer her an out or an explanation. “What are you doing here?”

“I haven’t been able to see her,” Laurel says, taking on a note of indignation. “We might not be best friends, but I’m still on friendly terms with her.”

Oliver shakes his head and pushes himself up off of the cot. “Sorry, I just didn’t expect you to…”

“Care?” Laurel supplies with an arched eyebrow. “Thanks.”

He shoves the cot back under the window, feeling irrationally angry. He moves the easy chair back beside the bed and gestures for Laurel to sit. “Well, visit with her, then,” he says shortly. “I need to use the facilities.”

Laurel moves around him hesitantly, dropping into the chair so lightly that she looks like she might spring right back up and leave. Oliver, disoriented from being found in such an intimate pose, opts not to use Felicity’s private bathroom. Instead, he makes a beeline for the public bathrooms in the lobby by the elevators.

He stays in there for ten minutes, washing his face with handsoap and scrubbing a hand through his undeniably shaggy head of hair. He’s now three weeks past needing a haircut, and he’s sporting a week-old beard to match it. He looks like he’s on the island again.

(Felicity would like the beard, though. He doesn’t know why he knows that, but he’s absolutely certain.)

He returns to Felicity’s room, contrite and armed with an apology, and Laurel accepts it gracefully. “This can’t be easy for you, after the year you’ve had,” she says diplomatically, her eyes searching his. “My dad said you were in an awful state the night she got admitted.”

Oliver simply nods, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall. “Yeah. I might’ve blown my cover that night.”

“If he has his suspicions, he hasn’t voiced them to me,” Laurel says. “But he’s pretty mad at alter-you.”

“I’m mad at alter-me, too.”

Laurel’s eyes widen slightly, and she stands up, still hesitant but brave. “So you were there?”

Oliver exhales through his nose and drops his voice. “Digg and I were both there. We got ambushed.”

“By who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She strides around the bed and stands in front of him, dropping her voice to a low murmur. “Tell me, Ollie.”

“You’ll just go after them, and you’re not ready for that.”

She presses her lips together, obstinate, but she seems to sense that Oliver’s not going to budge on the subject. “So what happened?”

“They separated us. One went after her, and she caught him by surprise with a frying pan, but it wasn’t enough. He raged and grabbed her.” Oliver can’t finish the story, but Laurel fills in the blanks well enough.

“You’re not going after them?” she asks in surprise. “You’re just… sleeping here?”

“I’m not doing anything until she wakes up,” Oliver says roughly. “I owe her that much.”

“You owe her justice.”

“No, I don’t,” he says sharply. “ _You_ want justice. Digg wants justice. I want justice. Felicity only joined our team to help us find someone she considered a friend. She changed us, changed how we work, changed our perspectives. This was never about justice for her, this was about right and wrong --”

“And you,” Laurel interrupts heatedly. “Or are you deluding yourself into thinking she only stayed to help make the city better? Newsflash, Ollie, _the city_ put her in this hospital bed.”

“I put her in this hospital bed,” Oliver says loudly, causing Laurel to jump. He takes a deep breath, trying to rein in his temper, and adds in a calm voice, “And I’m not putting on that hood until she wakes up and tells me what she wants me to do next.”

Laurel presses her lips together as she squints at Oliver. She sees weakness in him. She sees inactivity, indecisiveness, and frailty. She sees him shirking responsibility again, because whenever Oliver disappoints Laurel, she thinks he’s going back to who he was _before_. She thinks this is chickening out, because she doesn’t understand tactical retreats; that’s never been her style.

“I’ll have to find out who did this on my own,” Laurel says threateningly, leaning into Oliver’s personal space.

“You’re not ready,” he repeats. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

“How are you gonna stop me?” she asks, her eyes traveling down his body disdainfully. “You’re gonna be here.”

She leaves with one last, disappointed glare, then Oliver pulls out his phone and activates the lockdown code for the foundry.

No sense in making this easy for her.

 

* * *

_“When you told me you loved me, you had me fooled… for a second. I thought maybe you might’ve meant it. What you said.”_

_The most amazing thing about her was the way she never shrank away from her feelings. She wasn’t an overly emotional person -- not prone to melodramatics, crying fits, or outbursts of joy and ecstasy -- but she was never embarrassed to feel basic human emotions, such as pride, happiness, and love._

_He never knew why she took a shining to him. (Sometimes he thinks he fell for her long before she fell for him.) He only ever lied to her, and badly, so badly that she should’ve been insulted. But she persisted in her belief that he was a good person, that he was worth trusting with her secrets. Her opinion of him didn’t change after she found him bleeding in her backseat, and just like she didn’t find his money or celebrity intimidating, she was never afraid of his formidable skills as an assassin. She never hesitated to get in his face to argue, to plead, to wear her emotions nakedly, plain for everyone to see._

_“You really sold it,” she said, looking him right in the eye as they stood on the shoreline of Lian Yu. He learned that from her: eye contact. He’d never looked anyone in the eye as a young man, always taught to look away from prying eyes and cameras. On the island, Yao Fei and Slade trained him to conceal, to fight first and ask questions later, and Shado taught him about evasion and deception tactics. When he returned home, Oliver took on the mantle of the vigilante, and that meant more deception, more hiding. No one ever challenged him on it until the moment Felicity cocked her head at him, after his first terrible lie. Her eyes shot straight through him, ripping away his armor, and he found he didn’t mind it at all._

_It’s why he kept going back._

_Over the course of their partnership, he learned to meet her gaze. He was always the first to break, because sometimes looking at Felicity is like staring into the sun, but on that shoreline, he couldn’t bring himself to look anywhere else._

_“We both did.”_

_She held her breath, watching him again. He inhaled, swallowing hard as he waited for her to respond, and then they exhaled together._

_“Let’s go home,” she said gently, and he felt happy -- truly happy -- for the first time since his mother died._

 

* * *

Every morning, one of the nurses wakes him at 7 sharp as they enter the room to check Felicity’s vitals. He sleeps alongside her, which is probably why he’s been dreaming about her so much lately. The nurses usually find him holding her hand or resting his hand on her arm, and he’s learned to stop feeling embarrassed at being found that way.

Six days pass with no change in her condition. For the first couple of days, a group of nurses would come in and gingerly change Felicity’s position on the bed, in order to prevent bedsores. They stop doing it once they realize that Oliver is doing it for them, picking her up gently and turning her onto her side, or sitting her up, or laying her flat.

He leaves the room for lunch every day, long enough for the nurses to change her catheter or give her a sponge bath. Sometimes he’ll go back to the foundry to fit in a workout and check that all of the surveillance software is still running. He isn’t frustrated by the minimal amount of data he’s collected; he figures Merlyn is laying low, just like Oliver.

Bouquets of flowers start arriving the day after Laurel’s visit. The first is a large, beautiful bouquet of stargazer lilies and blue iris, sent from Walter with a note wishing Felicity a safe and full recovery. The next day, she gets three more bouquets from some of her QC IT department coworkers, people Oliver’s heard her mention in passing but has never met. (Some CEO he was.) A small potted geranium arrives from her longtime hairdresser, Cynthia (which Oliver gleans from the card; he didn’t know Felicity had a standing bi-weekly salon appointment that she’d missed). Roy even sends her a moderately-sized bouquet of tulips in a mason jar, apologizing for being out of town and unable to visit her. A lovely array of multi-colored roses arrives from the Lance family, and Lyla sends a bouquet of orchids with Diggle on one of his visits, along with a care package for Oliver. By day four on the recovery ward, Felicity’s room smells like a garden in springtime.

Oliver scans the local news sites, curious about the reports on Felicity’s attack. It turns out that an upper-middle class white girl getting attacked in the Glades is worthy of headline news; it definitely explains why Felicity’s started getting bundles of flowers with no notes attached. The consensus seems to be that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the Arrow had tried to rescue her from her attackers. No one seems to suspect that she was there with the Arrow, which is fortunate.

In his ample downtime, Oliver learns bits and pieces about the other patients on the floor from Jeanine, who is always happy to sit and chat with him. He’s not sure if Jeanine is just being nice, or if she’s devloped feelings for him, but it’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t know the burden he’s bearing when he’s all by himself.

Seven of the coma patients were attacked by Slade’s superhuman army in the spring, “Almost the entire east wall is patients from that night,” Jeanine says, pointing across the nurses station to the wall of rooms opposite Felicity’s.

“That’s terrible.”

“There’s a reason we have such a large facility for coma patients,” Jeanine says somberly. “And these are the lucky ones. Just eight days ago, one of the victims from that attack died. Her husband was inconsolable.”

Another evening, Jeanine informs him that three of the people on the ward have been in comas since the quake last year, “The one caused by Malcolm Merlyn and --” she says, then catches herself and flounders.

“And my mom,” Oliver supplies, grimacing.

Jeanine clears her throat, disoriented. “Oh, yeah, and, um… Mr. Gant, next door, he came in six weeks ago from the Glades. There was a drive-by shooting and his car went off the road and crashed into a ditch. He’s about your age, and his mother visits every day, tells me stories about how he works for nonprofits and is always doing community outreach. She was so happy when the Arrow busted that crime ring only two weeks after he was attacked.”

He’s not sure why he feels a surge of pride and accomplishment at her words, or why his face flushes with color as she smiles rather dreamily. It’s been a while since he’s felt proud of his nighttime excursions; guilt and despair have been his best friends.

He keeps an eye out for Mrs. Gant after that; she’s a short older lady, probably seven or eight years older than Moira would be, but she dresses in plain clothes with a threadbare coat draped over her arm and a handbag that looks like it’s seen better days. One morning, on her way into her son’s room, she offers Oliver a big smile and a wave; he returns it, feeling a deep sense of loss over having lost his own mother.

His mother who, after all, didn’t care much for Felicity.

A week after Felicity’s move to the recovery floor, Detective Lance pays them another visit.

Diggle is there this time, reading a magazine as Oliver flips through the channels on the TV. Felicity’s propped on her good side, facing Oliver but still comatose. Lance’s expression is grim as he takes in the sight of the three of them.

“Right, so. We got some information back about her attackers,” he says without preamble, holding a file out toward Oliver, but Oliver doesn’t move to take it. Lance stands there for a second, unsure, then glances over at Diggle, who holds out his hand for the file. “They’re associates of Malcolm Merlyn, who as you know, is miraculously back from the dead. Lotta that going around lately.”

Oliver ignores the barb.

“Anyway, Merlyn and the Arrow had beef during that big quake last year, and near as I can tell, Merlyn’s back to exact revenge. I guess Miss Smoak here was collateral damage.”

“Thank you for the information, Detective,” Oliver says curtly.

Lance sighs. “Look, Oliver, I know you don’t want to hear this, but someone needs to bring this guy to justice. The best thing for Felicity is for her to wake up and find that the men who did this to her are no longer a threat.”

“The best thing for Felicity is for her to wake up, period,” Oliver corrects. “After that, I don’t presume to know what she wants or what she thinks is best.”

He doesn’t miss the incredulous look Lance gives Diggle, or the exasperated shoulder-lifting that Diggle sends back. Let them agonize over semantics. He has his priorities.

“You think this city is better off now, with those guys walking free? You think this city is safe with Merlyn sitting up in _your_ old house, pulling strings and calling the shots? Someone needs to put a stop to this.”

“So what are you doing here, talking to me?” Oliver challenges. “You have a police department to do that for you.”

Lance’s nostrils flare as his lip curls. “You know exactly what I’m doing here, Queen. I’m telling you to get back to work.”

Oliver feels the color drain from his face as Diggle goes still. Lance shakes his head, squinting at Oliver in deep annoyance.

“What? You really thought I didn’t know? You three are inseparable. I saw your face on the rooftop during the Dollmaker case. I called the Arrow and your phone rang. My daughter, the Canary, was dating you. I’m a detective, Oliver, I’m not an idiot.”

Oliver blinks. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought we had an understanding,” Lance says, lifting his shoulders with his arms outstretched. “We never talk about it, I never have to lie under oath.” He looks at Felicity, lying between the two men who are unconsciously still in protection mode. “I never thought it’d get to this point, where you would refuse to fight. Especially for her.”

“We went to see Merlyn last week,” Diggle interjects. “We arrived at something of an understanding.”

“What, like a truce?”

Diggle purses his lips. “An understanding.”

“Which means this is the best time to strike,” Quentin says. “Look, Oliver, you’ve got the SCPD on your side this time. A young woman, seemingly defenseless, attacked in the Glades, it’s got a lot of people on edge. Knowing that it’s Merlyn behind it, that’s just made everyone more concerned. If you have a way to take him down, I’m just saying, the police won’t stand in your way.”

He leaves without saying anything else, and for the first time, Oliver feels overwhelming shame for his inactivity. Back when he was just doing this with Diggle, he wouldn’t have hesitated more than a day before he took out Merlyn; he’s just another crime lord, a harder one to beat, but just another bad guy. He started wearing that hood in order to protect the city… but he’s not doing anything to help it by sitting at his partner’s bedside, consumed with anger and self-loathing.

And who knows what Felicity would want? She’s not awake to tell him.

“That was really unexpected.” Diggle says, staring after Lance before he looks at Oliver askance. “I wonder who else knows your secret?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been three weeks since Oliver’s heard Felicity’s voice; it’s that single thought that pushes him through the rigorous planning and training.

They take seven days to plan it.

Oliver is adamant that they cover all of their bases (“We’re gonna steal from Slade Wilson’s book and _plan_ \-- for every variable, for every eventuality.”) and Diggle is desperate to complete the operation before Lyla’s due date.

It’s been three weeks since Oliver’s heard Felicity’s voice; it’s that single thought that pushes him through the rigorous planning and training.

They spend mornings at the foundry, doing target practice, working out, and gathering their weapons. Diggle goes home for lunch, while Oliver heads to the hospital, picking up whatever healthy option the cafeteria is offering for the day. Afternoons are spent in Felicity’s room, with papers spread out on her bed, on Oliver’s cot, and on the windowsill. Battle plans, travel routes, blueprints of the mansion, and a list of all of Merlyn’s known associates are drawn up, pored over, and reviewed for hours on end. Most nights end around 11, when Diggle decides to head home and Oliver curls up on his side, as usual, his hand curled around Felicity’s.

Her status remains unchanged.

The doctors, Dr. Wagner in particular, start talking about a tracheotomy, about physical therapy exercises to keep her muscles from atrophying, about long-term solutions. In the face of what they’re planning, Oliver can’t bear the thought of Felicity staying in this state for much longer, so he puts off dealing with it until _after_.

The truth is, he doesn’t know if he’s doing the right thing. Somewhere along the way, Felicity became his moral compass, even if she existed in the same morally grey area as the rest of them. Without her around to provide an opinion or offer an argument, Oliver feels lost.

But he can’t deny the truth in Detective Lance’s words. The city isn’t safe, Felicity isn’t safe, and despite his own reservations and fears, Oliver had an obligation as the Arrow to do what he could to protect the city he loves. Even if it means killing again.

He goes to Tommy’s grave and apologizes. He goes to his mother’s grave to explain. He goes to his father’s grave to seek validation.

The night before they put their plan into action, in the darkened and quiet hospital room, Oliver has a whispered, one-sided conversation with Felicity.

“This could all go wrong tomorrow,” he starts softly, over the sound of her heart monitor and ventilator. “I could get killed. Diggle and I could both get killed. Or we could end up your neighbors, since Mr. Gant in 1008 woke up yesterday.”

He watches her breathe. She’s lost weight, too much weight, but the doctors say that’s normal for how long she’s been in a coma.

“You could wake up tomorrow, or next week, or next month, and find you’re all alone in the world again. You’ll have to live the rest of your life not knowing how I felt, watching you die. How I feel sitting here, day after day, night after night, waiting for you to come back.” He swallows back tears. “You’ll know that I loved you, because you’ve always known that, haven’t you? But you deserved to hear it, at least once, and not as part of a bigger plan. And if I don’t come back tomorrow to tell you, I’m so sorry, Felicity.”

He sniffs, wiping his eyes with his free hand, trying to imagine what she would say if she were awake to hear him right now.

He strokes her hair away from her face, his fingers brushing her unblemished, unbandaged cheek. “You’re gonna wake up, and I’m gonna do everything in my power to be here when you do.”

He whispers the three words he’s too afraid to say aloud, his lips moving against the back of her hand. He wonders if she feels it, if she will remember.

He walks out of the hospital that night, terrified of leaving her alone.

 

* * *

 

 

After months of dealing with Slade Wilson’s subterfuge and careful planning, Oliver really doesn’t expect his and Diggle’s plan to go smoothly.

Hours after they put their plan into motion, Oliver watches from the rooftop of his old house as Detective Lance puts a handcuffed Malcolm Merlyn into the back of his cruiser. Two other cars plus a police van hold the rest of the men who were in the alley that night, plus a handful of Merlyn’s closest associates who had been found on the property.

They’d been arrested for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, treason, and murder. Oliver and Diggle had handed over more than enough evidence (procured during their surgical invasion of the house Oliver had grown up in; in that regard, Merlyn was an utter fool) to lock away Merlyn and his henchmen for good.

It had taken a precise combination of tear gas, tranquilizer arrows, and smoke bombs to take over the house, corner Merlyn, and acquire the necessary evidence. Blood had been spilled, but no lives had been taken. Turns out Malcolm Merlyn isn’t as formidable an opponent as Slade Wilson; Oliver supposes he should be grateful to Slade for that.

“You did good today, Oliver,” Diggle says steadily, standing beside him on the roof as they watch the cruisers pull out of the long driveway. “The city is safer with them off the streets.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I know,” Diggle says, sounding tired. “But you should care, because it matters to her.”

 

* * *

 

 

Oliver foolishly expects Felicity to be awake when he returns to the hospital that evening. A small part of him had hoped that she’d sense the change in the universe, that justice would compel her to wake up, but Jeanine reports that there is no change in her condition.

“The doctor strongly recommends a tracheotomy,” she says gently, placing her hand on Oliver’s forearm. He resists shrinking away from her touch, but she seems to sense that he doesn’t like it, because she pulls her hand away quickly.

“Tomorrow,” he says, tired. “I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow.”

Jeanine gives him a tentative smile, then asks, “Do you need me to clean up that wound on your face?”

She points at the split skin on his eyebrow, a gift from one of the armed guards at the back of the house, which is still oozing blood despite Oliver’s best efforts to stop the flow.

“Oh, this? No. Just an unlucky blow in the boxing ring earlier,” he says easily, waving his hand dismissively.

“You box?” she asks interestedly. “I never would’ve guessed.”

“I’m full of surprises,” Oliver replies automatically, tapping into that playboy persona that he so easily adopts when he’s dressed in expensive clothes and mingling with the masses.

“I bet you are.” She mutters it without an ounce of flirtation; in fact, her expression is shrewd as she crosses her arms and gives Oliver an appraising look. “You know Mr. Gant woke up yesterday.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“He was released today to go home, and when we checked him out, we found out that an anonymous benefactor had paid his medical bill in full.”

Oliver’s trained for this, but he’s still a little rusty at baffled nonchalance. “How nice for him.”

“Six weeks in hospital, with round-the-clock treatment, surgery, medicine… it was over a hundred thousand dollars.” Jeanine studies him closely. “His mother was in tears… seemed to think you had something to do with it.”

Oliver doesn’t say anything, but that appears to be all the confirmation Jeanine needs. She smiles and raises herself up on her toes, placing a soft kiss on Oliver’s cheek. “I’ll be back in an hour, Mr. Queen.”

An hour later, Jeanine finds him in the same place the nurses always find him: curled up on his cot alongside Felicity, fast asleep with his arm flung protectively across the space between their beds.

 

* * *

 

 

“We really should discuss alternative options for waking her up,” Dr. Wagner says like a broken record.

It’s the morning after Merlyn’s arrest, which has been all over the news, but Oliver has the television muted as Dr. Wagner levels Oliver with a hard look.

“These are tough calls to make, especially for loved ones, but her condition isn’t improving.”

“It’s not deteriorating, either.”

“No, it’s not,” Dr. Wagner says tiredly. “Mr. Queen --”

“Oliver.”

He looks surprised at the permission to be less formal. “Oliver,” he says slowly. “In cases like this, staying steady is not necessarily a good thing. Three weeks is a long time to go without any significant signs of improvement.”

“But as long as she’s here and staying steady, I’m not willing to do anything that puts her life in jeopardy,” Oliver says obstinately, his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

“What you don’t seem to understand is that right now, like this, her life _is_ in jeopardy,” Dr. Wagner insists. “We’ve passed the point where waiting for her to wake up is a viable option; it’s time to start employing some more proactive tactics.”

“Not today,” Oliver says firmly.

Dr. Wagner sighs and stands up straight, his eyes on Felicity. “I suppose you’re vetoing the tracheotomy today, as well.” It’s not even a question.

“I am.”

He’s gotten used to the disappointed looks from the people around him, but that doesn’t make them any easier to accept. Oliver rolls his eyes after Dr. Wagner’s back is turned, annoyed, but then the doctor hesitates at the door and turns back around.

“I know you care very deeply for her,” he says haltingly, his face lined with an emotion Oliver can’t quite place. “But you should consider the possibility that you might be prolonging her misery.”

Like that terrifying thought hasn’t occurred to Oliver. “Thanks, Doctor,” he snaps bitterly, glaring at the older man.

“You think I’m the enemy, Oliver. I’m not. These are the tough decisions that countless people in your position have had to make.” Dr. Wagner gives him a hard, almost fatherly look. “You need to consider whether you’re keeping her like this for her sake, or for yours.”

It’s only after he’s ruminated on Dr. Wagner’s warnings for a couple of hours that Oliver figures out the odd emotional inflection of the doctor’s voice.

Empathy.

 

* * *

Laurel visits later in the morning. She hands Oliver a coffee (she always grabs him a vanilla latte, his drink of choice before the island, and doesn’t seem to remember that he prefers black coffee now; he always drinks the latte anyway) and stands on Felicity’s right side, her eyes roaming over the young woman’s body.

“The bruise on her face is almost completely faded,” she notes after a moment, and Oliver’s noticed the same thing. Where ugly purple and blue blotches used to peek out from under her bandaging, now her skin is the sickly yellow of a mostly-healed bruise.

“They’re optimistic about her ribs healing cleanly, too,” Oliver says, lounging in the chair on Felicity’s other side and turning his attention to the TV.

Laurel follows his gaze and then smirks. “Nice snag, by the way.”

He lifts a shoulder carelessly. “It was easier than I thought.”

“The district attorney has more than enough to put away Merlyn and his henchmen for the rest of their lives,” Laurel says conversationally. “People get away with murder in this city all the time, but any attempts at espionage and suddenly the iron fist of justice comes down on you.”

“Whatever puts him behind bars,” Oliver says sagely. “I’m not picky.”

“Me either.”

They fall silent, watching the news anchor outline the charges leveled against Malcolm Merlyn. Oliver tries not to dwell on the fact that he’s essentially made his sister an orphan again… just like him.

“I’m sorry, Ollie.”

He looks back at Laurel, surprised, and sees that she looks truly contrite. “What’re you sorry for?”

“How I treated you last time I was here,” she says, blinking back tears that never fall. “And what I said to you. That was really unfair.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he says soothingly. “You of all people have every right to tell me when I’m being an asshole.”

“You weren’t, though. I was the jerk. It was just hard for me, because… whenever I was in the hospital, or my dad was in the hospital, or your sister or mother… you always left. I never knew _why_ at the time, but I just knew you left.”

He starts to sit up, intending to hug her and apologize, but that trick stopped working on Laurel a long time ago. She puts her hand out, indicating that he should sit and keep listening, so he obeys.

“And once I found out your secret,” she drops her voice on the last word, her eyes darting around the room apprehensively, “I knew why you were leaving. And I just… don’t totally understand why you would leave all of us, but you wouldn’t leave her.” She finishes rather tremulously, but her chin is up and her eyes are bright with unshed tears and conviction.

He casts a remorseful look toward the ground, his shoulders slumping as he relaxes into the chair. “This time was my fault. I should’ve been aware of the threat in the alley. I should’ve fought harder. I should’ve kept her beside me. I should’ve made sure she was never seen with me when I was in uniform. And honestly, I never should’ve asked her to join the team. That’s why I can’t leave, Laurel.”

She opens her mouth uncertainly, snaps it shut, then says, “I don’t… know her that well. But I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t blame you.”

“No one blames me,” he says bitterly.

She offers him a small smile. “How can they? You blame yourself enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sister/proofreader's note on this line: _He whispers the three words he’s too afraid to say aloud_ \-- "I want pizza."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver clenches his jaw and stares at the floor, hating himself, hating Diggle, hating everyone in this goddamned hospital who can’t just _wake her up_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn’t resist slipping in a Diggle-is-better-than-your-faves scene, because Diggle is actually better than your faves.

“This is gonna sound dumb, but I really thought she was going to wake up after we caught him,” Diggle says that evening around a mouthful of Kung Pao chicken.

“Me too.”

“Guess it doesn’t work like it does in movies.”

Oliver pokes at his egg roll morosely. “No, it doesn’t.”

Diggle sighs and sets aside his carton of food. “You know, you gotta stop doing that eventually. You’re being unfair to her.”

Oliver cocks his head. “How do you figure?”

“You act like you dragged her into that alley and knocked her against that wall yourself. I get feeling guilty, I know you feel responsible for having her on this team, but every time you act like this is entirely your fault, you rob her of a little more of her own free will.”

“You think this is just because she was there?" Oliver asks in disbelief. "Like she’s a victim of circumstance?”

Diggle purses his lips in that patented shit-eating smirk he does whenever he’s preparing to let Oliver dig his own hole of self-righteousness. For the first time in weeks, Oliver feels true anger.

“I couldn’t protect her,” he snaps, his fists clenched as his plate tips precariously on his lap. “I couldn’t get to her in time -- I shoved her behind a dumpster and then left her vulnerable to attacks.”

“It happens in battle all the time --” Diggle argues.

“She’s not a soldier!”

Diggle concedes the point, ducking his head as he continues to watch Oliver intently.

“And then, after it happened -- after he snapped her head against a wall, and she buckled and fell to the ground --” he chokes on his words, overcome with shame and anger.

“What?” Diggle asks, his eyebrows raised. “You collapsed?”

Oliver clenches his jaw and stares down at the floor, hating himself, hating Diggle, hating everyone in this goddamned hospital who can’t just _wake her up_.

“So what?” Diggle says, over-enunciating each word. “So what if you fell? You thought she was dead. I thought she was dead. It’s enough to send anyone into shock.”

“You didn’t, though.”

“I’m special-forces trained! I’ve been through years of combat, of losing men in battle! And Oliver, I haven’t endured nearly the amount of personal tragedy that you have in the past year.” Diggle lifts his massive shoulders in a helpless shrug. “Hell man, I probably would’ve judged you if you _hadn’t_ collapsed.”

Oliver doesn’t know what to say to that. He feels that familiar mix of gratitude and self-loathing, but mostly, he feels like a drama queen. Did he imagine the disappointment and anger in his partner that night? Was he projecting it? It’s always possible, he supposes.

“That’s why I joined your nutty crusade, Oliver,” Diggle says steadily. “I knew you couldn’t do this alone, not just because more men means more firepower, but because sometimes, you need a team to be able to make the right call when you can’t.”

Oliver glances over at Felicity, at the breathing tube in her mouth. Quietly, guiltily, he asks, “What about with her? Am I wrong in just wanting to give her more time?”

The heavy moment is broken by Diggle’s bark of a laugh. “Oh hell no. She’s gonna pull through. You made the right decision on that.”

Oliver chuckles softly, feeling all of the anger and rage seep out of his body as he relaxes. They settle into a companionable silence, munching on their food and watching Felicity as if the only thing left for them to do is wait for her to wake up. As difficult as this ordeal has been, he doesn’t think he could’ve survived it without Diggle.

Oliver definitely doesn’t deserve them, but he wouldn’t trade them for the world.

 

* * *

 

It’s the beeping that wakes him up.

It’s different this time; the tempo is faster, the beat is varied, and the sound is almost urgent. His eyes pop open and what he sees in the dim light of early morning nearly makes his heart stop in his chest.

There’s no mistaking the blue of her eyes as she blinks up at the ceiling groggily.

“Felicity?” he asks, his voice thick with sleep. He scrambles to sit up, his hand still on hers, and leans over her bed until he’s in her line of vision. His voice is louder, hopeful, as he repeats, “Felicity?”

She blinks once, her expression unfocused toward the ceiling, then her eyes widen and her chest starts to rise.

“No, shh,” he says soothingly, placing his hand on her cheek and cradling her face. “Don’t panic, it’s just a breathing tube. Everything’s gonna be all right, okay?”

Her eyes dart around the room, still wide with alarm and -- to his wild terror -- an utter lack of recognition. He frantically searches for the bed controller to press the nurse’s call button, still muttering soothing sounds to Felicity as she starts to twitch in panic.

“Hey, shh, it’s me, it’s Oliver,” he says, his heart hammering as she continues to stare past him with naked fear. “Felicity, it’s Oliver, the guy who’s always ten minutes late to all of his appointments --?”

She blinks, her body going rigid under his hands as her eyes finally focus on his face. He puts his hand back on her cheek, stroking gently with his thumb as he continues to make soothing sounds. Then suddenly, like someone’s flipped on a light switch, she recognizes him. She relaxes and turns her head to nestle her face in his hand; he can’t even comprehend the joy he feels when she does that.

He presses the call button for the nurse again, glancing up at the clock and noting that it’s just past four in the morning. She always was an early riser. Jeanine appears a few seconds later, and she cracks a wide smile when her eyes land on Felicity.

“Oh! She woke up!”

The surprise in her voice does nothing to puncture Oliver’s mood -- the staff had no faith in his girl’s abilities to fight back.

Jeanine calls in two assisting nurses and they make short work of removing Felicity’s breathing tube. She coughs violently, her entire frail body shaking with the movements, and Jeanine cautions her not to speak as she lays her back and begins an examination.

Oliver doesn’t leave her side; he grips her hand firmly, unwilling to let go, and Jeanine wordlessly moves around him, checking Felicity’s eyes, heartbeat, pulse, and reflexes. Now that she’s awake, Oliver’s worried about finding out she's partially paralyzed, but judging by her movements so far, it seems that all of her limbs and extremities are working.

“I’ll page the doctor now, but so far, so good,” Jeanine says brightly, beaming at Felicity. “He’ll be here within the half-hour.”

She leaves them alone, and for the first time since he saw her open eyes, Oliver is scared. No, he’s _terrified_.

Felicity turns her head to look at him, and his breath catches in his chest. He can’t decipher her expression; she’s usually so open, but there’s something guarded about the look she’s giving him as she says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” he whispers back, feeling tears prickling his eyes as he smiles at her.

“You’re here.”

He nods tightly. “Yeah. Where else would I be?”

“Has it been… three weeks?” she asks raspily, her eyes roaming over his face. “Your beard.”

He chuckles and strokes his face softly. “I know how much you dig the homeless look.”

“It’s not bad,” she agrees, then coughs again. “Sorry. I have a bit of a headache.”

He should laugh. She’s joking, she seems like the same old Felicity, but as overjoyed as he is to hear her voice, he’s not exactly in a joking mood.

She notices; he refuses to look away as she searches his expression, then she lifts her hand slowly to feel the bandage on her head. As her hand travels toward her right ear, Oliver says her name like an apology.

“Did they shave it?” she asks softly, and when he nods, she blinks back tears. “Well. That’s going to be tough for my hairdresser to figure out,” she says bravely.

Oliver coughs out a laugh even as he starts to cry. She's reacting just like had Diggle predicted, but it’s no less heartbreaking to watch. Part of him wants to beg her to break down, to blame him, to throw him out of the room, just so that this howl of emotions can be anchored on something real.

“Hey, stop,” she says softly. “You’re not allowed to cry, when you cry, I cry.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his head bowed. “I should’ve protected you.”

“Are you saying you didn’t do your best?” she teases him gently, already forgiving him. She doesn’t know what he’s been through, how scared he was that this conversation might not have ever happened.

“Don’t, Felicity,” he begs her, feeling his stomach twisting at her widening smile. “Don’t do that. I saw you die,” he whispers, wishing he could put into words how that felt. “Just please… don’t. Okay?”

She nods once, her lips pressed together as she fights her own tears. “Okay,” she murmurs, placing her hand on his face. She strokes her fingers through his beard. “I know how you feel… I’ve watched you die before, too.”

_Not like this,_ he thinks, but she knows that.

He watches her as she looks around the room; she notices the cot, and his duffel bag, and the vast array of flowers. She smiles slightly and points at the bulletin board. “I see one of my cameras.”

“You don’t even have your glasses on,” he says, passing the back of his hand across his eyes surreptitiously as he talks around the lump in his throat. “How can you see that?”

“I know my own equipment, Oliver,” she replies archly. Her voice is stronger now. “Plus, three weeks in the hospital… no way you wouldn’t bug the room.”

“I wasn’t going to let anything else happen to you,” he says, because he fails at being lighthearted. She opens her mouth to argue, but they’re interrupted by a knock at the door.

Oliver can’t help the triumphant smile he flashes at Dr. Wagner when the older man slides the door open and steps into her room. “Yes, yes, Mr. Queen, you were right,” he says, putting his hands up in surrender. “If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t bet against you.”

“If you were a betting man, you’d know not to bet against Felicity Smoak,” Oliver says with a hint of a smile. “Everyone has to learn that lesson at some point.”

Felicity makes a confused noise, looking to Oliver for an explanation, but he just squeezes her hand lightly as Dr. Wagner steps to her bedside. “How are you feeling, Miss Smoak?”

“Sore. Tired. Croaky,” she rasps. “Mostly hungry.”

“Might want to start light,” Dr. Wagner says mildly. “Your stomach isn’t used to food anymore; you’ve been on an IV diet for three weeks.”

“Like all of my Hollywood idols,” she deadpans, turning her head toward the doctor as he examines her pupils.

“You’ll also be dealing with some muscle deterioration,” Dr. Wagner continues. “It may require some physical therapy, nothing too rigorous, but not to be taken lightly, either.”

Felicity nods once, then winces in pain. “And what about…?”

“Your injuries,” Dr. Wagner supplies helpfully, flipping her chart open to look at her notes. “You suffered two broken ribs and a broken arm; both were set in the emergency room and appear to be healing nicely. You also have a broken finger on your left hand that is mending just fine.”

Felicity and Oliver wait in silence as Dr. Wagner examines her chart further. Her grip is a bit stronger now, and her eyes are a little more focused as she watches the doctor.

“As for the head trauma… you suffered a significant injury,” Dr. Wagner says delicately. “We will need to monitor it closely for the foreseeable future, until it’s healed. CAT scans and MRIs, for the most part. We had to do surgery to drain the blood and relieve pressure, so we have to make sure there was no long-term damage caused by that.”

“We could start with long division,” Felicity suggests lightly, and right before Oliver’s eyes, Dr. Wagner succumbs to her charms. Oh, it’s always so easy for her.

“I’m talking primarily of short-term memory issues, fine motor skills, that sort of thing,” he says seriously, despite the smile playing on his lips. “It’ll be something we have to take one day at a time. Recovery is a process, not a fixed point.”

“When can she be released?” Oliver asks.

Dr. Wagner glances up at him apprehensively. “I wouldn’t recommend it for a couple of days, at least. Coming out of a coma is no small thing --”

“Mr. Gant left only 24 hours after waking up,” Oliver interrupts rather rudely.

“Mr. Gant didn’t have the same injuries as Miss Smoak here,” Dr. Wagner says patiently. “He didn’t require close supervision of an open head wound. Don’t worry, Mr. Queen. Despite what you believe of me, I really am trying to do everything in her best interests, medically speaking.”

Felicity gives Oliver another confused look as Dr. Wagner pats her shoulder.

“I’ll be back in the daylight hours to talk over your recovery in greater detail. For now, just get some rest.”

“I see you made friends all over the place while I was out,” Felicity says after the doctor is gone. “How many of them did you hold at arrow-point?”

“I… might have thrown a chair at one point,” Oliver confesses. “In front of a nurse down in the ER waiting room. But Dr. Wagner actually likes me, I think,” he adds quickly, before Felicity can chastise him for his outbursts in front of poor unsuspecting nurses. “We’re cut from the same cloth, me and him.”

Her indignation fades as she watches him. It must be hard for her, he supposes, to realize that his life kept moving while she missed three weeks of it. He always hated the sensation of waking up on that metal table in the foundry to Felicity and Diggle’s relieved faces, and having them recount his seizures or the number of times his heart stopped. Until now, he never truly appreciated what they must’ve gone through every time he flatlined or seized up.

He reaches out and brushes her cheek with his knuckles, trying to figure out a way to voice the millions of thoughts swarming in his mind. After a moment, he settles for simplicity: “I’m glad you’re back.”

She smiles at him, a half-smile because of the bandage on her head, but a smile nonetheless. “So… how long am I supposed to let you keep making that face at me?”

“Face, what face?” he asks lightly.

“The one where you look tragic and sad and desperate, like I’m a broken doll and it’s all your fault.” She’s never minced words; Oliver takes this as a good sign that she hasn’t sustained any serious, long-term brain damage.

“It’s not that ridiculous of a face,” he reasons seriously. “You are in a hospital bed with some serious wounds, and it’s entirely my fault.”

She sighs. “I’m just saying, since I’m the one who’s lying here with broken bones and a fractured skull, maybe it’d be nice if you let me decide who to blame for all of this.” She pretends to ponder for a moment, then says, “I choose to blame Justin Bieber. He’s responsible, somehow.”

“Okay, fine,” he says tensely, not rising to her bait. “But it won’t change how I feel.”

“That’s not fair --” she starts gently, but he shoves away from her bed and stands up, putting as much space between them as he can. He hadn’t even realized his anger was building until just now, when she tried to forgive him, _again_. His fists are clenched at his sides as he stands in front of the window, staring at her from across the room.

“Oliver, why is this always so hard for you?” she asks, her voice small, tired, and barely loud enough for him to hear, but irked nonetheless. “You clearly want to say something to me, why don’t you just say it?”

“It’s not that simple,” he grits out.

“When is it ever?”

“I’ve been selfish with you,” he says angrily. “Keeping you close by, letting you be part of this -- this insane crusade, without any real means of protecting you -- I’ve been selfish just by staying here with you every day, waiting for you to wake up. I might as well have put up a banner announcing how much I --”

He stops, his pulse pounding with fury and disgust at himself, his heart breaking at the tears that fill Felicity’s eyes as she stares at him in deep disappointment.

“If you think it would’ve been better for me to wake up all alone in this room, then you really _are_ selfish,” she says bitterly. “I never asked you for anything more than you gave me. You didn’t owe me anything more than I already had.”

Her words crush him. Aside from the uncharacteristic acerbity of her voice, there’s a disorienting but undeniable sense of finality to her tone, like something is broken between them. Like he broke her heart, along with her ribs, arm, and skull.

He didn’t think he could’ve felt any worse than he did a couple of hours ago, when she was still asleep with no reassuring signs that she would ever wake up, but he feels infinitely more miserable now. It’s unbearable.

He can’t be in this room anymore. He can’t be the target of her accusatory stares, so close to his nightmares, not right now. He grabs his coat and mutters, “I gotta go.”

He avoids her gaze as he strides out of the room. She doesn’t say anything to stop him.

 

* * *

 

He goes to the same abandoned building where Digg and Felicity had found him on the day of his mother’s funeral. He sits against the same pillar, just staring into space, losing track of the minutes and hours until his back hurts and his mouth is dry.

Shame. That’s what twists in his stomach and travels up his spine as he sits there, slumped, balling his hands into fists and then relaxing them again.

Diggle was right -- they were _both_ right. He’s not being fair to Felicity by treating her like some tagalong that he keeps at his side for his own ridiculous purposes. She chose to join the team, she chose to stay, she _got on a plane and found him on an island_ , she stayed after he ignored her and insulted her and blamed her for his own shortcomings… She’s nobody’s sidekick, so why does he try to treat her that way?

_Because it’s easier than admitting how I really feel_ , he thinks bitterly. But she said it herself -- she never asked for more. She was exactly where she wanted to be that night: between her two partners, fighting crime, making the city a better place.

Maybe she loves Oliver, and maybe he loves her back. But that little fact never mattered to him before; it only matters now because he almost lost her.

So why is he so scared to tell her?

 

* * *

 

He gives her an entire day by herself. He gets an earful from Diggle when he goes to the foundry for a workout and a shower -- “You’ve stayed at her bedside for weeks, and the minute she wakes up, you _abandon her_?” -- but Felicity clearly didn’t tell Digg about the nature of their fight, so after a quick upbraiding, Diggle lets it go. He spars with Oliver, allowing both of them to let out their pent-up anxieties of the past few weeks, and by the end of it, everything is back to normal between them.

Except for the fact that Felicity is still in the hospital.

 

* * *

 

He gets to the hospital just after seven o’clock the next morning. Felicity is sitting up, eating a bowl of oatmeal, her movements clumsy as she uses her left hand to hold the spoon. Her expression is guarded when he slides her door open, and they stare at each other warily for a second before Oliver offers her a tentative smile and a soft, “Hey.”

She sets down her spoon, her expression melting into something a little more friendly, but still guarded. “Hi.”

He walks around her bed and goes to sit in his usual chair. She watches him the entire time, somehow still owlish despite the fact that she’s not wearing her glasses. She places her bowl back on her breakfast tray, then pushes the entire thing off to the side for the nurses to clear when they come back.

“How’s the food?” he asks conversationally, feeling too awkward to just jump into whatever he came here to say.

“Not really sure,” she says, grimacing. “I’ve had trouble keeping stuff down.”

He smiles at her sympathetically. “Guess I should’ve checked if you wanted me to bring you anything…”

“Maybe just some chicken noodle soup, next time,” she says, her fingertips fiddling with her blanket. “If there’s gonna be a next time.”

He inhales deeply, then reaches out to take her hand in both of his. She stares at their intertwined fingers, her expression arrested. “There’s gonna be a next time,” he says softly. “I’m gonna be here every day until you get out… I’m gonna be the one to take you home… I’m gonna sleep in your guest room until you’re all healed and back on your feet…”

She lifts her eyes to his, cautious and doubtful. “Really?”

He nods. “Only if you’ll let me.”

She smiles. “Oh, I get a say in this?”

“Of course.”

She laughs quietly. He’s missed that sound. He’s missed _her_.

“That’s if you’ll forgive me if I get all moody and start blaming myself again,” he amends quickly. “It’s just, I’m really good at that… it’s probably gonna happen a lot…”

“I reserve the right to get angry whenever you do that,” she says quickly. “It’s definitely not my favorite quality of yours.”

“Hey, be nice to me,” he says beseechingly. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my favorite girl was in a coma for a few weeks, it’s been hard on me.”

“It was probably a walk in the park for her,” Felicity replies lightly. “She got a much-needed break from your brooding and insane mood swings. She probably puts up with a lot from you.”

“She’s pretty awesome,” he agrees, feeling his heart swell as he looks at her. He could tell her right now, he feels brave enough, but it’s not the right moment. She deserves some consideration, a return to the status quo for a while, and it’s not like he’s going anywhere.

She sucks in a deep breath, then with a very serious expression, says, “Oliver, I have to tell you something.”

He watches her expectantly, even as the dread pools in his stomach.

“The doctors have been doing tests… checking my brain and my body, you know, because of all the damage,” she says uneasily, clutching his hand a little bit tighter. “They had me up and walking yesterday afternoon, I’m allowed to walk to and from the bathroom now, but… I’ve been having trouble with my left leg.”

He clenches his teeth together, hard, trying to bite off the reaction she seems to be dreading. “Trouble how?” he asks finally.

“Just, sometimes it gives out. Sometimes I can’t move it for a second. They tell me it’s not bad -- should come back with physical therapy and patience, but… I didn’t want to fall on you one day and have you be mad at me for not telling you,” she finishes softly, almost trailing off as she says it. “I know you don’t want me to say this, but it isn’t your fault.”

He lets out a harsh laugh. “Let me have at least… sixty percent of the blame,” he reasons with her, and she shakes her head.

“You're never gonna change, are you?” 

He gives her a cocksure grin, a ghost of the man he was before his crucible, and his tone is mocking when he replies, “Would you have me any other way?” 

She laughs, a genuine laugh that shakes her too-thin frame, and the sound makes Oliver's body hum with happiness. She shakes her head again, as if she's amused by his audacity, then fixes him with a more serious expression. “You know, Digg told me about the operation… the one that got Merlyn and all of his men arrested.” She beams. “You did a really good thing.”

All he can do is stare back at her, beaming so brightly, like he’s looked at her countless times before.

“The nursing staff thinks you’re a big ol’ softie,” Felicity continues, her eyes shining as she shifts slightly in the bed. “You should hear how they talk about you. I’m pretty sure you would have your pick of hot nurses if you only asked.”

“As enticing as it sounds to pick from a pool of hot nurses, I’ve got my mind on other things,” he says casually, his thumb tracing circles on the back of her hand. Slowly, he raises his eyes to hers, his heart hammering as he tries to project everything he can’t say. She stares at him in surprise, then slowly, she gives him a hopeful smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up: the last chapter will be a little short, but it sees our fearless heroes home! As always, thanks for reading, you guys are amazing.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For at least an hour, all three of them forget the pain of the past month, the fear of the future, and the uncertainty of where they stand as a unit now that their numbers have grown. For an hour, they’re just happy.

Andrew Michael Diggle, much like Solomon Grundy, is born on a Monday.

Two days later, in the quiet corner room on the recovery ward, Felicity watches in delight as Diggle holds his baby son. “He looks absurdly tiny in your arms,” she remarks fondly. “He’s beautiful, Digg.”

“Probably gonna be a Seal Team Six member or something,” Oliver says from his usual chair. “With two badasses as his parents, he’s definitely destined for great things.”

“I’ll settle for him being happy,” Diggle says, cradling his son gently. “He’s got good genes. He’ll figure out the rest.”

And for at least an hour, all three of them forget the pain of the past month, the fear of the future, and the uncertainty of where they stand as a unit now that their numbers have grown. For an hour, they’re just happy.

 

* * *

 

“What took you so long to go after them?” Felicity asks out of the blue on Thursday morning, looking up from her copy of _Wired_ magazine. “To go after Merlyn? Did you have trouble finding him?”

“No, we got that information pretty quickly thanks to Lyla,” Oliver says from his cot by the window, where he’s lounging with his legs outstretched, flipping through a book about trench warfare in World War I on his tablet.

“So then why did it take you almost three weeks to take him down?”

He sighs and gives her a long-suffering look, as if her questions are a great nuisance to him even if he secretly loves her inquisitive nature.

(The “love” part is getting easier to admit with each passing day.)

“The truth is, I had a lot of trouble… leaving,” he says carefully. Off of her nonplussed expression, he adds, “You. I had trouble leaving you.”

“Oh.”

“Digg tried the gentle approach, you know, giving me some time to get my head right, but it was actually Lance who brought me around,” Oliver continues. “He knows my secret, by the way.”

“He’d be a total idiot if he didn’t know, Oliver,” Felicity says without missing a beat. “You’re not very good at cover stories. You were dating his daughter!”

“Yeah, well, it was still a big surprise to me.” Oliver goes back to his book, thinking the conversation is over, but he glances up again when he senses Felicity is watching him. “What?”

She shrugs nonchalantly. “The nurses gossip, that’s all.”

He rolls his eyes. “You mean _Jeanine_ gossips.” The nurse had grown quite attached to Felicity in the past week, to the point that Oliver frequently found himself the odd man out in any given argument. He tries not to think about all the things Jeanine must be telling Felicity when he’s not around, but it’s not like he’s going to start hiding his feelings now.

“She’s definitely your type,” Felicity continues lightly. “Leggy model-type, intelligent, strong… and she’s totally into you.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” he replies, turning his attention back to his tablet.

“That’s fine. She told me she figured out pretty early on that you weren’t available,” Felicity replies, and when he turns his startled eyes back on her, she’s reading her magazine as if the conversation had never happened.

 

* * *

 

On Friday, Felicity is finally released from the hospital.

She’s sporting only her arm cast and a large bandage on her head, having asked the doctors to remove the bandaging around her torso before she went home. She’s in high spirits as Oliver wheels her through the lobby to the private entrance, where he has a car waiting away from prying eyes.

He helps her into the car; she refuses to be lifted and moved, insisting that she has to move on her own if she ever wants to get better. She hoists herself up and, with her hand wrapped around Oliver’s bicep for stability, she gets into the limousine mostly by herself.

On the drive to her apartment, he holds her hand on the seat as she stares out into the city. She’s quiet for the entire ride, and he lets her stay that way, sensing her contentment in her silence. When they pull up to her apartment building, he wordlessly insists on carrying her inside, and she acquiesces with the smallest of laughs as he lifts her up.

“This place looks the same,” she says in a strange voice as he steps into the entryway of her apartment. The curtains are all drawn, the lights are off, and there’s a light layer of dust on everything, but otherwise the place looks normal. He carries her to her couch and sets her down gently, then turns to help the driver bring in the rest of their things.

She’s managed to procure a laptop by the time he’s tipped the driver and put away her things; she must have at least seven of them stashed in different places, so he really shouldn’t be surprised. “What’re you doing?” he asks, amused.

“Checking on my programs.” Like it should be obvious.

“Felicity, we took good care of your stuff while you were gone,” he says patiently, tugging the laptop away from her. “You’re supposed to be on the mend.”

“Oliver, you’ve been really great to me, and I love you, like, in a totally platonic way,” she stumbles, her cheeks turning red, “But if you take a piece of technology away from me again, I’m gonna have to install some malware on every computer you own.”

“You don’t scare me,” he teases her, holding the laptop aloft.

She can’t move, because of the cast and the temporary limited mobility, but she tries to grab it anyway. The motion brings her right into Oliver’s personal space -- clumsily, embarrassingly, and ever-so-Felicity-ly -- and it freezes both of them.

“You gonna tell me now?” she asks quietly, so close that he can feel her breath on his face. The question is so unexpected that he sits back, setting the laptop on the table beside him.

He searches her eyes, but she looks the same as she did on that shoreline in the spring, except for the bandage covering almost half of her face. So he settles for the truth: “You _do_ scare me.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean, I was terrified,” he says with effort. “When you hit the wall…”

He sees a flicker of doubt cross her features before she blinks and refocuses on his face.

“... I thought you were dead,” he says darkly. “You went out, cold, and I… collapsed. I fell over. I couldn’t move. I didn’t save your life, you know -- Diggle did. The thought that I had lost you -- that one second you were there, and vibrant, hitting this big guy with a frying pan, and then you were gone…” he trails off, allowing himself to feel everything he’s been concealing since the day she woke up. All the fear, terror, blame, and self-loathing has bubbled just below the surface, and now he’s drowning in it.

“I think it broke me,” he finishes finally, his eyes downcast. “It was one of the worst moments of my life.”

She puts her hand on his face, just the way he likes, stroking through his beard with her fingertips. “Is this the part where you tell me I can’t come back, because you can’t risk losing me again?”

“No,” he breathes out, laughing mirthlessly. “No, Digg taught me a little something about… about free will, while you were out. No, this is the part where I _beg_ you not to come back… but I gracefully accept the fact that you will, anyway.”

“He’s learning,” she sing-songs, pulling her hand away to do a little victory fist-pump. “It’s about time you started treating me the same way you treat Digg, as long as I’m on the team.”

He furrows his brow, feeling like he's missing something. “What’re you talking about?” 

“Would you react that way if it was Diggle who was thrown against that wall?” she asks dubiously. “Would you sit there and beg _him_ not to come back?”

“In a heartbeat,” he says automatically, scooting closer to her in earnest. “Felicity, I can’t lose _either_ of you. If Diggle was the one in the coma for three weeks, I would’ve been in that hospital room with him around-the-clock, too, and you would’ve been the one bringing me changes of clothes and Chinese food.”

“Oh,” she says in a small voice. She really had no idea; that’s probably his fault.

“I’m trying to get better at this stuff,” he adds quickly. “Being part of a team means we share our victories and our sorrows, our accomplishments and our failures… I’d beg Diggle not to come back, to live out his life with Lyla away from the mess of the seedy underworld of Starling City, but I know deep down that he wants to be in the trenches. Just like you.”

She nods in agreement, still watching him apprehensively.

“And just because I don’t feel about Digg the same way I feel about you --”

This time it’s his turn to blush over a slip of the tongue.

They sit there, staring at each other uncertainly in the darkened apartment. His brain is jammed, he can’t think of what he was going to say; all he can see is Felicity, beautiful but battered Felicity, alive and fighting, looking at him like… like…

“Try counting to three,” she suggests softly, her eyes on his lips as a ghost of a smile plays across hers.

And with a smile that stretches muscles he hasn’t used in a long time, Oliver mutters, “Three… two… one.”

 

* * *

 

{ Epilogue }

In the following weeks, two nurses named Emma Parsons and Jeanine Ashby find that their nursing school loans have been paid in full by an anonymous benefactor. Both women receive bouquets of daisies which simply say _"_ _Thanks for putting up with me."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to [Beth](http://archiveofourown.org/users/treble), who always encourages me to write and post. She finally succeeded, through gentle cyberbullying. 
> 
> Thank you for reading. I love you all, Marta.


End file.
